Parlor dimensions and upscale appointments add up to a flattop that’s a pleasure to cradle.
Ultra playable, super comfortable, and great action. Beautiful design details. Sweet fingerstyle voice.
Pricey for an import.
$829
Fender Paramount PS-220E
Fender’s new Paramount PS-220E Parlor is a million kinds of fun. For starters, imagine picking up a little old Stella tucked away in a dusty corner of a garage sale—only to find the action is perfect and the tuners actually work. Then consider the basic joys of any good little acoustic: how easy it is to hold, how light it is, how little room it takes up when you leave it sitting around the living room waiting for whatever spark of inspiration hits at random. The PS-220E dishes oodles of those small pleasures. And while the price isn’t exactly small for an imported instrument of this stature, the playability and versatility are equal to much more expensive instruments.
All Dressed Up
There are a lot of reasons the Paramount sells for a somewhat premium price. It’s charmingly handsome—in no small part because of the detail work that reveals itself up close. The purfling, rosette, and backstrip are fashioned around a pretty feather-and-checker pattern of blue, green, and red that alternate with spaces of antique white. The entire neck and headstock are bound, and quite immaculately at that. The ovangkol fretboard inlay and headstock overlay are classy and understated but feel that extra bit luxurious. The visual charm is reinforced by a subtle chocolatey burst finish on the solid mahogany top. And while the solid mahogany back and sides are made from what some might call rough grain, the rustic effect works in harmony with the fancier details to create a sort of restored antique look.
While the price isn’t exactly small for an imported instrument of this stature, the playability and versatility are equal to much more expensive instruments.
You certainly can’t complain about the detail work on the guitar’s exterior. Adding so many visual treats means more spots where workmanship can go wrong. But everything from the frets to the binding, purfling, and inlays are pretty much perfect. Inside, things are less so. There is evidence of sloppy gluing and less-than-precise kerfing cuts—none of which have any bearing on the sound. But the price of the guitar does leave you longing for a tidier touch on that count.
Sit and Strum Awhile
If you imagined the perfect guitar for sitting down with after a long workday, or the ideal songwriting partner that you drag from the garden to the beach to the living room and down to the studio, it might feel a lot like the Paramount PS-220E. The action is delectably low, and you can vigorously strum barre chords from the 1st fret to the 12th without hearing any buzzing or clanking strings. The C-profile neck is just substantial enough to make you feel like you’re not squeezing to fret effectively, but slim enough that you can move around quickly. The easy playability means the PS-220E very handily transcends simple strummer roles. Fingerstyle moves and complex chords are made significantly easier for the low action and nice set-up, which can give you a lot of confidence for stretching your playing. It’s great for leads for the same reasons. Occasionally there is a slight sense of disappointment because the small parlor body can only generate so much muscle for these applications. And there is inevitably some limits to the dynamic range you can generate. That said, the PS-220E has impressive headroom for a guitar of this size. And pushing it to its limits rarely creates any harsh overtones.
The Fishman Sonitone Plus undersaddle pickup and preamp are, in general, an effective addition to the PS-220E. The tones most suited to the guitar tend to live in the lower third of the tone control’s range, and I generally played with the volume as low as possible to soften any undersaddle transients. Hard strumming, needless to say, brought out the least flattering of these sounds. But the Sonitone could sound quite sweet in fingerstyle situations, which makes it a nice fit for the very fingerstyle-friendly PS-220E.
The Verdict
It’s hard to find a reason to complain about any aspect of the PS-220E’s performance or playability. It feels fantastic—at times like a natural extension of your body. And if you struggle at all with hand or body fatigue from wrestling with a bigger instrument, it’s hard to imagine a more enjoyable alternative. But the PS-220E is appealing for many reasons beyond comfort. The playability makes it a much more direct line between your musical intuition and imagination, which is a pretty invaluable thing whether you’re a songwriter or tackling a challenging tune or arrangement. It’s a good thing the PS-220E is as stylish and easy to play as it is, because $829 is pretty steep for an import instrument. But regardless of price or place of manufacture, you can’t argue that the PS-220E is a pure joy to hold and play.
A close look at acoustic design reveals artfully engineered contours that strike an ideal balance between structural strength and musical responsiveness.
As acoustic guitar players and makers, we use the term "flattop guitar" so often it may come as a surprise when careful investigation reveals the top and back of a guitar to be anything but flat. While an archtop guitar's dramatically sculpted top and back contours are obvious at first glance, signaling cello-like inspiration and construction, the subtle contours of our favorite flattops are equally critical for the structure and sound we love.
To better understand how this gracefully curved structure works, consider the practicalities of how a guitar top is constructed. From a board, a very thin sheet of wood is cut. Typically, two or more pieces are joined together edge-to-edge in order to provide the most predictably uniform wood grains across the width of the guitar. This top usually has what's known as quartersawn grain orientation for maximum strength and consistency, with the growth rings of the wood perpendicular to the guitar's face, as if the hard grain lines were miniature structural beams.
Braces are glued to the underside of the top in any number of different arrangements. The purpose of these braces is to guide the vibration of the top in a way that makes a pleasing musical sound, while imparting enough strength to the top to avoid physical distortion or outright fracturing when supporting the tension of the strings.
One challenge a guitar maker faces is to build the top with very light weight, so it can respond easily to string vibration, yet enough strength and stability to withstand the immense tension. When a flat sheet of material is bent into a curve, even a subtle curve, its strength is increased significantly. Imagine a sheet of paper. It's very thin and incredibly flexible. When held in a curved shape, it becomes far stronger perpendicular to the axis of the bend.
When a flat sheet of material is bent into a curve, even a subtle curve, its strength is increased significantly.
In a more extreme example, if the paper is rolled into a tube, it becomes exponentially stronger, all without adding any additional mass. This same principle is applied to a guitar top. Most commonly, instead of a mere cylinder shape, where the top is arched in a single direction, the top is gently coaxed into a spherical shape, increasing its strength in every direction. This spherical shape is formed and held in place by cutting a corresponding curve into the braces and sides of the guitar—which are far less flexible than the thin wood of the top itself—and gluing the entire structure together to anchor this shape in place.
Unlike the top, the grain orientation of the braces glued to the top prevents them from following the shrinking or swelling in dry or humid conditions. As a result, the top or back will slowly sink, eventually becoming flat, or even slightly concave, in dry weather. The subtle built-in arch of a top or back allows the wood to have room to shrink before it cracks. We could think of this as building in some slack to prevent damage. In humid conditions, the top and back will swell, rising up into a higher arch as the wood grows in size. While this will temporarily raise the strings higher from the fretboard and make the guitar harder to play, no further damage is imminent.
The practices of arching a top and back are practical habits of instrument makers that stretch back hundreds of years. Each maker has its own approach to this subtle art and uses this as an ingredient in voicing the sound of instruments. Regardless of the exact amount and relationship of the arches, which vary by the maker's design and are further influenced by the weather and conditions of the day, it seems our guitars remain a curiously beautiful balance of carefully thought-out physics and artful practicalities.
