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The ToneQuest Report
March & April 2001
Ken Parker, Parker Guitars
When you play
and hear a Parker Fly, it’s easy to picture Jimi moving between the
liquid tone of the Fly’s magnetic pickups to the piano-like chime of
the Fishman piezo in the bridge. Parkers can’t be confused with
anything that came before, can they? Way out there… Now, can you see
yourself strapping one on? Time after time when we took our two
Parkers out for reviews we heard the same comments. Pulling them out
of their cases we’d hear, “I could never play one of these out.”
Then we’d plug them in and wait while our reviewers worked out with
them. Five or ten minutes later, smiling, “Hmm, maybe I could play
this.” Then the inevitable follow up question – “How much are
these?” No matter what your gut reaction is to the visual effect
created by Parker guitars, when you play one we believe you’ll
quickly form a deep respect for Ken Parker’s creations, and we urge
those of you who haven’t tried one to do so soon. The fretwork will
absolutely spoil you rotten, nothing sounds or plays quite like
them, and as you’ll discover in our interview with Ken Parker, a
lifetime of experience and careful reflection went into the creation
of the Fly. These guitars were not designed and built by a guy who
just wanted something to sell. So settle back and enjoy the
following conversation with Ken – one of the most interesting and
thoughtful “guitar people” we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing
for the ToneQuest faithful. Quest forth… and go play a Fly.
TQR: Ken,
let’s start with the genesis of your fascination with the guitar.
When and how did it occur?
Well, I’m 48, and
for me it was really hearing The Beatles. I wasn’t in a position to
have had the classic R&B influences I’d liked to have had (laughs),
so I had to get it distilled through rock groups like so many of us
did. It was compelling stuff being 12 years old and getting my socks
blown off by music that bore no resemblance to what my parents told
me was music.
TQR: The
Yardbirds …
Yeah, all of
that.
TQR: So did
you start out playing guitar in garage bands?
I played piano at
first until the guitar player in our band got me turned on to it,
and I built my first somewhat functional guitar when I was 13. I
made it from cardboard and wood, but it had strings on it.
TQR: Where
did you learn to work with tools and wood?
My grandpa was a
good craftsman and I grew up working with him in his shop. He built
furniture – mostly wood and sheet metal projects. My father wasn’t
way into it, although he was a very mechanical guy, but I’d have to
wait until we went to grandpa’s house to get into his shop.
TQR: How
did that initial interest in building guitars evolve?
In college I got
into making jewelry… a geodesic dome… started building things and
getting excited about that. I took a furniture-making course, and my
brother had a short-scale bass from Japan that was a piece of junk
and he needed a better instrument. I looked at it and thought,
“Well, there’s nothing too complicated about this,” so I built him a
bass that he still plays today. I never looked back after that,
really. I got so excited about it that I couldn’t really keep my
head in my college career. I did a non-resident course in Rochester,
NY with a really good furniture maker and I never came back to
school after that. I ended up staying in Rochester for another five
years and that’s where I did my apprenticeships that prepared me to
become a real instrument maker.
TQR: Let’s
talk about your apprenticeships…
Yeah, this is
where it gets interesting. The first furniture maker I’d worked with
closed his business and I had started building solidbodies in my
basement, but it became real obvious to me that I didn’t have the
command over the tools, and furthermore, that I couldn’t find the
right tools. So I got the idea that I wanted to learn to be a
toolmaker… that was probably the most important thing I ever set my
sights on.
TQR: How
did you go about doing that?
Well, at that
time there were some pretty interesting manufacturing plants in
Rochester, so I’d just walk in and tell them I wanted to learn
toolmaking. Of course, they’d just laugh and tell me that I didn’t
understand – you have to go to trade school and work years at it,
but that’s not what I wanted – I wanted to just dive right into it.
So I lucked out and got a gig working for a company that made these
fantastically complicated grandfather clock movements. There were
over 600 parts in one clock and they were all made at this factory.
I got to study for almost two years with a wonderful toolmaker and
fabricator who was in his sixties – a very patient and gentle
teacher. It was an amazing gift. After that, I wanted to go back to
furniture making, and I worked at a company that built very
extravagant and expensive furniture for wealthy people. There were
only two of us, so again, it was this one-on-one scene where I got
to work with someone who was extraordinarily gifted. We took on some
very ambitious projects building furniture with inlays, curved
veneers, some kinetic stuff like tables that adjusted for height,
and we also built some 5-string banjos… It was at that time in
1973-74 that I started moonlighting taking in repairs, and I also
became friends with a guy named Robert Meadow who was building
renaissance lutes at the time. We ended up leaving Rochester and
setting up a shop together with me building archtop guitars while he
was building lutes. That was a great time.
TQR: So the
archtop was the first style that you really
poured the coals to as a builder?
Yeah, I had built
other guitars in the early ‘70s, but at that time I was just trying
to figure out how the darn things worked – how to get frets in.
There was really very little material available back then – no
supply companies, very few books, and certainly no specialty tools
for instrument makers.
TQR: How
about the wood supply?
Since I was
making furniture, I knew how to get wood – that wasn’t a problem.
Those were the good old days – you could go down to a lumberyard and
buy Brazilian rosewood in Brooklyn. Think about that.
TQR:
Building furniture, you must have also learned quite a lot about
finishing fine wood…
I have to say
that finishing was always the last thing I was interested in. Most
of what we did was specialty finishes – hand-rubbed private recipes
for oil-based finishes. That was the look on high-grade pieces, and
when you think about it, it is kind of sad to embalm wood in plastic
finishes.
TQR: Well,
I guess the traditional practice of applying
French polish is long gone…
Oh, no, not at
all. You can get your classical guitar finished in a French polish
all over the place. It’s a simple finish that takes a quite a knack
to apply, and anybody with reasonable dexterity, judgment, and
patience can learn to apply it – especially if somebody who knows
how to do it shows them how.
TQR: But it
isn’t practiced in the guitar industry…
No, because for
the industry it’s an impractical finish. For one thing, it takes a
very highly skilled person to apply it, and secondly, if you spill
your gin and tonic on it the finish will just slide off in your lap
because it’s alcohol-soluble. It also provides virtually no
protection.
TQR: Sounds
as if it would allow the wood to really breathe, however…
Well, we can get
into that – wood doesn’t really breathe…
TQR: Good,
we do have other questions about that. Back to your apprenticeships…
Well, my partner
eventually took off to teach a woodworking program in New Jersey and
I was stompin’ around Manhattan trying to figure out what was going
on in archtop guitar making in the late ‘70s. There was nothing
going on except for Jimmy D’Aquisto out in Long Island, but I was
trying to figure out if anybody was going to buy my guitars. It was
a tough time, because back then you could buy Gibson archtops and
D’Angelicos for very, very short dough – often a grand or less. I
was feeling a little frustrated with that, and I’d gotten to know
Jimmy D’Aquisto, who was a great inspiration and help to me, and I’d
been in touch with John Monteleone, so I knew the grand players in
guitar building at that time but I wasn’t quite sure where to go.
There just didn’t seem to be a clamoring for the kind of guitar that
I’d fallen in love with making. I didn’t know how to make a living
at it. So I ended up taking a job at Stuyvesant Music at 48th and
7th Avenue. That was another series of master classes in which I
worked for thousands of musicians as part of a very large staff.
There were seven guys doing repairs and adjustments plus a couple of
guys doing electronics in a 3,000 sq. ft. shop right in the middle
of Manhattan. I got to meet and hangout with all of my heroes – Joe
Pass, Jim Hall, John McGlaughlin… playing my instruments and just
hanging out, it was an amazing time. I also built some custom
solidbodies for people like Andy Summers, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed…
it was a wonderful place to be. I still wanted to get out and build
my own guitars, but the idea of opening a shop in New York staffed
by one guy who was intent on experimenting was pretty far-fetched. I
needed a low-rent place to work, so I wound up moving out to
Connecticut for the rest of the ’80s and living with my grandpa,
bless his soul. He put up with me and really supported me while I
was developing the Fly.
TQR: Ken,
you state in your literature that “Having worked with thousands of
musicians, you asked
them to define their instruments best features and worst failings.”
What are the features we should
note in the current Parker line that
best define those lessons you learned working with so many
musicians?
Well, the glib
answer is just look at a Fly guitar. But you know, this isn’t rocket
science… when you handle so many instruments and talk to so many
guitar players, you can distill the wisdom of the group. What I
found was that the best guitars tend to be light and responsive.
There is room for heavy musical instruments… they do serve some
purposes, and they definitely delight some players who won’t have it
any other way – they need something that weighs eight or ten pounds
and just sits still, and I have no quarrel with them. It just seemed
to me that many of the most enlightened players really preferred the
lighter guitars. For example, in the world of Telecasters, somebody
that really digs them will pick up a heavy one by the neck and just
set it back down because they know it’s not going to turn them on.
So there’s a kind of a lively, spirited response that you can only
get from an instrument that is relatively lean. It’s not hard to see
how instrument making goes in a lot of different directions. For
example, how much less material could you use in a violin and still
have something that wouldn’t just fall apart when you tuned it up?
On the other hand you have a piano which takes six guys to move
across the room, so it depends on what you’re trying to do and how
much energy you have to put in. One of the things that I come back
to over and over again is that the guitar has these little bitty
strings on it that aren’t as long as you’d like them to be, and you
only get to hit them once per note. You haven’t got a bow in your
right hand to drive them berserk, or in the case of the piano, you
haven’t got three strings for many of the notes and a soundboard
that connects those three strings to dozens of other strings that
are tuned in octaves and fifths and fourths and every other interval
that can resonate with those notes that you’ve just struck. So when
you play a piano and you hit a key, it excites a jillion other
strings and the whole thing gets going… For a piano that sits in
your lap like the kind I make, it seems that you need to be careful
with that little piece of energy that a guitar player can put into a
string by plucking it, and efficiency counts.
TQR: You’ve certainly succeeded
there with your guitars. We were recently conducting amp reviews at
a manufacturer’s shop and after using several different guitars we
switched to a Nitefly, which prompted one of the employees working
in an adjacent room to run in to see what kind of guitar we were
playing that “sounded like a piano.” It was the Fly with the piezo
mixed with the single coils, and it did sound like a piano.
That’s very nice
to hear. When I first started building guitars I built solidbodies
first, and I got away from them because it seemed to me that there
wasn’t a whole lot to them – I wanted to build something that was
more complex and challenging. In guitar making, there is no more
complex and challenging instrument than an acoustic archtop. On a
carved instrument you can control the stiffness and distribution of
the stress on the top and that’s what makes it so interesting.
TQR: The
carving of the top, the bracing pattern, the thickness of the
braces…
Yeah – any time
you’re building an acoustic guitar, you’re building a speaker.
You’re building a transducer that takes the vibrational energy of
the strings and turns it into the vibrational energy of air, and
you’ve got to do a good job to avoid having a lot of losses and
unevenness in there. It involves a very complex set of decisions and
the list of variables is almost infinite.
TQR: We recently interviewed a
builder who was talking about tuning his tops and finding the
fundamental frequency within each guitar that he builds – tuning the
structure for a specific outcome. Since that’s what you build today,
can the same philosophy be applied to solidbodies as well?
Sure… every
object has a fundamental resonant frequency, including the chair
you’re sitting on. It’s not something that’s unique to musical
instruments. When a builder starts to build an instrument, the first
thing he or she does is start listening to the material.
TQR: How do
you do that?
You uhhh…
(laughs)… I’ll answer the question with a story, if I may. In 1976 I
went on a pilgrimage to the mountaintop, so to speak, to meet Jimmy
D’Aquisto… Here I was with butterflies in my stomach, holding my
first acoustic archtop in a case, hoping for some criticism and
encouragement, and one of the things that happened was that I
approached him in what I’ll portray as a small, weenie-like voice
and said, “Gee Mr. D’Aquisto, what do you do when the wood isn’t
perfect?” To which he replied, “Let me show you how to make a
guitar.” He runs across the room to his wood stash, picks up a rough
top that had been glued up, blows the dust off of it, holds it up on
the fingertips of his left hand like a waiter carrying a tray, holds
the top next to his ear, and starts whacking it with the thumb of
his right hand. Then he says, “First, I listen to the wood.” Then he
runs back across the room, picks up a hand plane and starts cutting
into it, and says, “Then, I cut into it.” It was such a moment for
me (laughs). You work with what you’ve got and you listen to it.
Listening is the end, and listening is the beginning. When you start
making any instrument out of any material you start out by listening
to it. When a violin maker builds a violin or a viola, the first
thing he or she does is take the bridge and drop it on the table and
listen to how it sounds, over and over again. You let the wood speak
to you – you get an idea of how bright that little piece of wood is,
and it helps you make some decisions about what to do with it – how
to proportion it. I’m thumping on everything all the time (laughs).
I’m always interested in hearing what something sounds like. So can
you tune a solidbody to a note? You can, and in acoustic instrument
making tuning a top or a back is one way to unify your work and to
have a touchstone and a basis that you can carry from one instrument
to the next. In and of itself, tuning a piece of wood to a note has
no value – it’s only after you figure out what you’ve done and
whether you like it or not or you want to change it that it has
value. In the violin world, for example, they weigh the top and back
pieces… I never went that far because I was always trying too many
things… it wasn’t as if I had a perfect model and I was trying to
make them all exactly like that. I have done some work with Carleen
Hutchins, who is America’s foremost acoustic researcher in the bowed
instrument world. Carleen had a little school in Montclair, NJ and
we would try to add to and learn from the body of scientific data
that she had gathered on bowed instrument making, so I do have some
familiarity with that approach to instrument making. People took
such good care of the best bowed instruments that we know quite a
lot about how they were made. There’s a huge volume of literature
and recorded experience related to the quest of copying the best
Italian instruments of several hundred years ago.
TQR: Let’s turn to your guitars
as we know them today… It seems as if you set out to design an
ergonomically driven instrument that also cannot possibly be
mistaken for anything else – no one can accuse you of having
borrowed from the past in designing the Nitefly…
That was a design
goal.
TQR: I’m
sure it was, but what were you thinking, Ken?
That’s a really
good question. I toyed with going to art school but it never seemed
like the right place for me somehow. As a result, I was never guided
as a designer, and every time I drew a line it was extremely painful
anticipating cutting out that headstock, because I was never really
sure if it was the right one. Let’s just start with the headstock…
in the classical world the headstock and the rosette are pretty much
the only places the guitar maker has to sign the guitar visually.
Even the headstock… unless you do something a little startling, it’s
going to be really tough to tell one from another unless you make it
really blunt or really ornate. Neither one seems to sit right on the
guitar, so people are drawing all kinds of mustaches and whoop-dee-doos
at the end of their headstocks to try and sign them. I guess that
worked better when there were just a few dozen people building
guitars compared to however many there are now. So in order to
distinguish your instrument as something that’s memorable that won’t
be confused with the guy down the block, you have to do something
with the headstock. What I wanted to do… back to ergonomics… one of
the things that bothered me about electric guitars – one of the
reasons why it took me so long to take them seriously as a project,
was that they just seemed to be so carelessly designed by people who
were trying to make a buck on something that was easy to make and
cheap to make. Not that those are criticisms, but coming from where
I was coming from it just didn’t look like the most exciting project
in the world. Now, let me back up and say that I’m not casting
aspersions on the best work of my predecessors. I admire the best
work of all types of guitars – certainly Leo Fender and Ted McCarty
made huge and lasting contributions to the world of instrument
making, but one of the things that bothered me about electric
guitars was that they wouldn’t sit peacefully on your lap. I
couldn’t figure out why people thought that was OK. Your triple O
isn’t trying to commit suicide… it sits on your lap quite nicely,
while the Strat wants to fall one way and the Les Paul wants to fall
another. I didn’t get it, so that was one of the first design goals,
and I thought we should start out by making the part that wants to
fall on the floor really light, hence the minimalist six-in-line
headstock on the Fly. That’s the beginning, and people ask, “Gee,
how do you make such a light guitar out of wood?” The answer is, you
don’t use a lot of wood – just the wood that you need to do the job,
and as far as visuals are concerned, you try and tie it together. I
won’t rant about design, but suffice it to say that we are used to
looking at the designs of the ‘40s and ‘50s and they look familiar
and normal to us, whereas if we could go back in time and view the
initial reactions to those guitars when they were introduced, people
were excommunicated for buying Fender musical instruments – driven
from their bands…
TQR: Sure… the Telecaster was
referred to as a toilet seat cover by some, no question. Back to the
Parker, however, where in the world did you come up with the idea
for carbon glass fibers?
This is a good
story… it’s no secret to an engineer that if you have something you
want to make high-performance in terms of strength-to-weight ratio,
you put all the strength in the skin. This is how the airplanes we
fly in are made… this is how a cockroach is built. How about a
lobster? Same thing – you put all of the important material on the
outside because that’s where it gets its leverage – it’s strength.
This was first demonstrated by instrument makers many hundreds of
years ago in Turkey with the oud, and later in the Renaissance and
Baroque periods with the lute, which was a descendent of the oud.
When the Moors took over Spain they brought the oud and actually the
word oud was corrupted into lute. This instrument came from the
eastern Mediterranean to the western part, people started building
it a different way, and over hundreds of years it morphed into this
series of incredibly ornate, difficult to build and play instruments
with as many as twenty strings on it. The lute was literally the
electric guitar of that period – there were many, many of them made,
and they were made so lightly in order to respond and sound like
something that they all eventually got crushed or broken. Only a few
survived, but of those that did, they demonstrate a very high degree
of craftsmanship and problem-solving. For example, lutes of a
certain period when the necks started to become big and long so
people could get lower notes out of them had the following two
features; they had truss rods made by your local blacksmith that
were driven from the inside of the instrument while they were
red-hot, through the neck block, into the neck. Obviously they were
non-adjustable (laughs). The other thing they did was make the necks
out of soft, light material and they veneered them in very hard,
stiff material. The neck might be made of spruce, and it might have
a thin layer of ebony or rosewood glued on the outside of it. This
gave a long-wearing surface that was handsome, easy to embellish,
and it provided a huge amount of strength right where you wanted it
– on the outside of the neck. Now fast-forward to the Fly guitar –
the neck is made of basswood which is a light, stiff, good-sounding
material, then a thin outer layer of composite material, which just
means any material that’s made up of two or more things that has
better mechanical properties than either of the two materials alone.
The composite that most people have experience with is paper mache –
that’s an example of something that’s much stronger than anything
you can make out of just paper or just flour. The kind of composite
that we use in making guitars then for the “flour” is epoxy resin,
and the “newspaper” is glass and carbon fibers.
TQR: That
is oriented “triaxially.”
Yeah, exactly…
the glass fibers wrap around the neck diagonally and the carbon
fibers run along the neck vertically. Some people have described our
instruments as being incapable of holding up to string tension
without the composite reinforcement, but that is just not true.
Basswood is an OK neck by itself, but it’s apt to have funny
resonances simply because it’s so lively. The composite material
that we glue on the outside of the guitar and also down over the
body and the headstock on the Fly is there for sound – to change the
way the wood responds sonically.
TQR: So it
wasn’t just to come up with a radical, different look. We’ve
reported on our fondness for vin-
tage Japanese reissue Strats made from basswood in the past – we
love them.
Basswood is great
material – it’s stiffness to weight ratio approaches that of Sitka
spruce, which has the best stiffness to weight ratio of any
vegetable material.
TQR: Are
you the only builder that has ever built a production guitar with a
basswood neck?
I think so.
TQR: How do
you get the fingerboard and fret work to be so consistent and so
flawless?
You know, the
name of game is to consistently hit a midpoint in guitar building
that is going to make the majority of people happy. In the early
‘80s I had done hundreds – probably thousands of fret jobs. I’m not
the type to count them, but not only have I replaced frets that were
installed by manufacturers, but I’ve also replaced those that were
put in by other repairmen, and I promise you that there are very few
people that do superb fret work, and most people who claim to do
superb fret work hardly improve the guitars that they work on. I
don’t mean to be mean-spirited, but this is simply a matter of
record. So many of the guitars I received looked like they had just
come from a bar room brawl after the frets were leveled or replaced,
or god forbid, a new fingerboard… It just seemed like the whole way
it was done was flawed. If you’re making a handmade instrument, you
find the perfect piece of wood, you dry it out for a long time, you
apply your considerable chops to it and you come out with a damn
nice neck that stays straight with a nice fret job, if everything
goes well. But in production, that simply isn’t the way it works.
They have to get wood that they can get, it comes in on a truck,
they cut it up and make guitars out of it. Some of them are better
than others… you know…
TQR: Yes, we do know. We’re
always talking about those “magical” guitars that for some reason
just come off the line with a tone that’s uniquely fine and all
their own. But you have to get very lucky to find one, and play as
many as you can get your hands on in the process.
Yeah, and who
wants to sell ‘em? It seemed to me that in order to do really
terrific fretwork you had to be part machinist, part jeweler, and
part psychic. Then on top of that, if you didn’t have at least a few
hundred fret jobs under your belt, the likelihood of being to handle
the next one, whatever it was, was pretty low. Everybody’s guitar
neck is different – some of them have bound ebony boards, some have
lots of inlay, and those have their own unique problems. Some are
maple, and those have their own issues, and then there are the frets
that are available, which are not very precise, and in my opinion
they are far too soft as a group. The temptation today is to make
fret wire softer and softer, and that’s what the whole industry is
succumbing to.
TQR:
Because it’s cheaper?
Because it’s
easier to deal with. Yes, it is cheaper – the material isn’t cheaper
– the cost of the four feet of wire required to do a fret job is
pennies – but it’s handling the frets and getting them in right and
then leveling them and polishing them and re-crowning them and all
of that stuff. And standing behind them if the neck goes wonky
afterwards. That’s where the expense is, and every guitar
manufacturer struggles with this. And it seemed to me that if I was
going to start a guitar company, I needed to solve this problem. I
didn’t think it was fair for an unsuspecting guitar player to go
purchase an instrument from a premium builder and then have to
refret it. It just seemed cruel (laughs). And it seemed to me that
there was no other product in life in which people would put up with
that. I mean, let’s say you’re a trumpet player and you bought a
trumpet and the middle valve didn’t come back all the time. You’re
laughing, but if you go buy a premium guitar, you will have that
experience quite often, and guitar players will just put up with it!
It just made me mad.
TQR: Well, not only fret work –
we’ve talked with people who work on new guitars that see
inconsistent neck angles, humps in the fretboards… it’s like
anything else – you need to know what to look for in a car or a
guitar.
Sure, but the
fret thing really bothered me. I mean, frets are not that
well-attached to begin with, having been driven into slots at the
factory.
TQR: One of
our pet peeves is when someone takes new fret wire with a nice high
crown and just files it
down so that now you’re playing on railroad ties.
That’s one of the
big problems, but there are unfortunate reasons for doing that. For
example, the hump that you referred to – suppose that when you
prepare the fretboard for fretting you don’t prepare it properly.
When you’re all done and you string up the guitar that hump is still
there – what do you do? Well, now you have to take that hump out of
the frets. A perfect fret job occurs – and can be done – when after
putting all of the frets in, you don’t have to level them. It’s a
rarity, and it almost never happens, but it has happened with some
of the guitars I’ve built in the past, but it’s very, very rare. The
frets can go in unevenly, a little crumb of wood can lodge
underneath the fret where it’s supposed to be touching the
fingerboard – that’ll goof you up. You can hit the fret too hard and
crush the fingerboard so that the fret seats too deeply. You can
bend the fret wrong or hit it too hard so the ends pop up… It’s not
like doing fret jobs is going to make you rich. I mean, here you are
working in all this nasty dust, grinding someone’s chicken salad
sandwich off their fingerboard with sandpaper… it’s kind of
disgusting work, really. The fingerboards are falling apart and
chipping… it’s not that a good job can’t be done, but it requires
the patience of a saint.
TQR: For a
couple of hundred bucks…
That’s what you
pay down there? Well, I’m thinking about those guitars with lots of
binding and inlay – you get that for $200?
TQR: Not if
you want to keep the nibs…
Let’s say that
you do a good fret job – then what happens? The owner takes it,
plays the shit out of it and wears the frets out again. Not fair.
This is a nineteenth century system and it’s just not OK – it’s not
OK that it’s expensive, and it’s really not a long-lived system. And
then once you replace the frets again you start taking chips out of
the fingerboard slots, and before long you’re either putting puddles
of epoxy in there or thinking seriously about replacing the
fretboard. Those were the things that motivated me. Of course,
everybody wants a fret that doesn’t wear out, and I explored this a
long time ago. No wire company is going to talk about rolling really
hard wire. Fretwire that looks like a mushroom on cross-section
starts out round. It passes through a very precise set of hardened
roller dies, and the dies form the wire into that funny shape with
the tangs and the beads. That’s a tough project – not an easy wire
shape to make and one of the more complicated production wire
shapes, so the last thing the wire guy wants to do is roll hard
material. It’s hard on the equipment, it’s hard to hold dimension,
and at some point the metal just will not flow into that shape. It’s
not like you’re squirting metal out of a hole – you’re trying to
crush it into this other shape. So to do that, the metal has to
flow, and metal can only flow so much before it work-hardens.
Work-hardening is what happens that enables you to break a coat
hanger with your hands. And it’s not enough to make fret material
hard – you also have to make it tough, and stainless steel fills the
bill. It has moderate hardness – not as hard as the pocket knife
blade in your pocket – but its toughness is unsurpassed in metals.
Its resistance to wear and deformation is huge.
TQR: So
what you’re speaking of is pure stainless – no other alloys present?
How much silver
do you think is in nickel silver fret wire? Zero – never was any.
It’s just a trade name that the Germans came up with – it’s a
bronze, which is primarily copper and nickel, while brass is
primarily copper and zinc, so when they say 18% nickel silver, they
mean that there is roughly 18% nickel added to the copper and some
other things. The difference in toughness between bronze and
stainless steel is enormous. Nickel is hard stuff and reasonably
tough when it’s by itself – a pretty formidable material, but you
could never make fret wire out of it – it would be way to hard to
deal with and it wouldn’t roll. They put as much nickel in the wire
alloy as they can, but it just never gets hard enough and tough
enough to behave the way we would ideally like it to behave, and as
a result, frets wear out depressingly quickly. So when we say that
our frets are stainless steel it doesn’t mean that there is
stainless steel in the bronze – it’s all stainless, primarily made
of iron, and the thing that makes stainless steel stainless steel is
chromium. Chrome is really hard, very tarnish resistant, and it’s
really, really tough.
TQR: You
have developed a patented process of bonding the fret wire to the
fretboard, correct?
Right…our
fretwire is actually a D shape and it’s bonded directly onto the
fingerboard without the need for tangs, beads, or slots in the
fingerboard. Another thing that we haven’t mentioned – and this is
depressingly common – the slots in the fretboards of many commercial
guitars are not accurately cut and the frets are not in the places
they need to be. Consequently, these guitars cannot be made to play
in tune no matter how you set the intonation.
TQR: Are we
talking about cheap commercial guitars?
No, we’re talking
about “top quality” guitars. I have a whole bunch of letters from
people who say, “I can no longer play my XXX style guitar because I
can’t get it to play in tune like my Fly. There are so many facets
to this…when you were talking about your pet peeve (and it’s not
just yours), about people grinding off fret height and rendering an
odd shape fret with a flat top on it – there are two issues there.
First, a fret with a flat top cannot possibly play in tune
because the string cannot possibly be in the center of the
fret, and the flatter it is, the worse it is. When the frets are
freshly flattened, the string will play flat because the takeoff
point will be at the backside of the fret, and when the frets have
some wear the string will play sharp because the takeoff point will
be at the front side of the fret (laughing). Does that suck? So the
only correct shape for a fret is half-round or ovoid, or whatever it
is – a beautifully smooth curve that connects the height and the
width so that when you press down on the fret, the string is stopped
at the center of the fret. There was a guy by the name of Phil
Petillo…I don’t know if anyone remembers this…who had an idea to fix
that, and he patented a triangular fret that really felt terrible,
but guaranteed that the string witness point was in the middle of
the fret (laughs). So that’s most of the fret story. The other part
is that the frets are only one component of this – the others are
the surface of the fingerboard, which has issues of feel and
smoothness, and the configuration or overall geometry of the neck.
If you look down a neck…by the way, if you don’t know, I’ll tell you
that the correct way to do this is by looking from the bridge end…
TQR:
Really?
Everybody looks
from the wrong end. Sight down the frets from the bridge end, and
because of the beauty of mathematics and perspective, the frets will
line up in a sheet if you hold the guitar at the right angle.
They’ll look like a solid surface and it’s then pathetically easy to
tell whether they are lumpy, or whether there’s a bump in them or a
divot or an S curve or anything else. If you get good light from on
top and you get the guitar aligned perfectly and you look from the
bridge, you can tell everything about the guitar at a glance.
Looking from the headstock is just an extra hurdle – it’s really
hopeless.
TQR: But if
you wanted to detect a neck twist…
It’s the best way
to see any problem with a neck. Actually, all things being equal a
neck twist is not a defect. It’s the one thing that a neck can do
and still be made to play correctly, although the likelihood of this
happening by itself is pretty slim. If you brought me a guitar with
a big twist in it I could make it play to your satisfaction – even
better. The reason for that is the neck needs to be correct for each
string and each string is a separate entity and has its own frets of
reference. In fact, there are a couple of people that build
instruments that deliberately have very twisted necks – as much as
25 degrees of twist, which is hysterical. It’s a little bit of a
brainteaser, but it works especially well on basses. Because of the
length of the neck on a bass, as you move your hand down the bass
your hand starts to unwind and twist away from you, and as you move
your hand the other way towards the upper regions of the bass your
hand naturally twists towards you.
TQR: That’s
true, and the effect is even more pronounced if you’re a guitar
player playing a bass like a guitar player.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway, it can be done and a couple of people have patents on
it.
TQR: How
did you arrive at the fretboard radius for your guitars?
On any stringed
instrument where the string spacing is wider at the bridge than it
is at the neck, the surface of a correct fingerboard is a cone and
not a cylinder. It’s a section of a paper coffee cup, not a soda
can. In that event, the arc on the fingerboard is different
everywhere. It changes.
TQR: You’re
saying it should change, ideally…
It has
to change…in order for it to be correct. The big manufacturers have
never used conical surfaces – they never have. One of he
reasons to refret a guitar is to flatten the end of the fretboard so
it doesn’t fret out when you bend strings. They fret out because
they’re too curved up there and if they are built correctly they
won’t fret out. So in common guitarspeak, there are two phrases that
are used to describe the arc of a fingerboard. Geometry is pretty
cut and dried…how about the phrase compound radius? This is a
term of nonsense – it has absolutely no meaning. A radius is the
straight line measurement between the center of a circle and the
outside of a circle, as you know. It is no more or less than a
straight line, and you cannot compound a straight line. It’s
geometrical nonsense, like saying a flat curve or a
straight circle. What it’s intended to convey is the notion of a
conical surface. Every violin that was ever made has this
combination of shape. On a guitar that’s correctly set up, the arc
is from a smaller circle at the nut than it is at the bridge, and
that’s what people are trying to say when they use the term
compound radius.
TQR: So what are you using on
the Fly? I was at a shop earlier today and asked what the fretboard
radius on a Strat I had with me was, and the guy just pulled out a
Stew-Mac plastic template gauge – I was expecting something more
interesting and complex as an answer…
If you had a good
guitar repairman and he refretted your guitar, when he was finished
you would have a conical section. Not because he would get out
templates necessarily (although if you subscribe to the Stew-Mac
style you have to have a template to blow your nose), but just to
accommodate the string. If you corrected the fretboard surface so
that all the strings were happy, you’d end up with a conical
surface. The reason is that there is no string on a six-string
guitar that is parallel to the centerline.
TQR: So
getting back to the Fly…
At the 12th
fret on both the Fly and the Nite Fly, the arc is that of a 12-inch
radius circle – sort of in the middle, where a Gibson is. The old
Fenders were very, very curved – ridiculously curved by modern
standards. They’re odd don’t you think? It also causes difficulties
with the magnetic pickups, which are not curved… Anyway, the Gibson
standard is a 12-inch radius arc all the way from one end to the
other, and Fenders or Ibanez or whatever are also the same from top
to bottom.
TQR: Well,
it’s too time consuming to cut a concial surface on a production
fretboard, right?
Right, it’s too
much work, unless you’re the guy that says if I can’t create a
perfect fretjob with frets that won’t wear out, then I don’t want to
start a guitar company. We have a fixture that puts a conical
surface on the guitar before the fretboard is glued on, and we do it
under string tension. In other words, every single guitar that we
have ever built has had a set of strings on it, and then has been
frozen in that position in a special fixture and sanded to this
conical surface. Then that conical surface is transferred through to
the top of the frets by pressing a thin, conformal, fretted
fingerboard to this perfect surface. That’s why we don’t do any fret
work. If you do it right the first time, you don’t have to apologize
for it, warranty it, and when we send you two guitars to review they
both play great.
TQR: You
devote quite a bit of space in your literature to tone woods – a
fairly new term in commercial guitar speak…
When you start a
company and you draw a line in the sand, you have to decide where
you’re going to start, and we chose to start with a black guitar
with a poplar body and a basswood neck. For a long time, it was a
handfull just meeting our own quality standards at that level. It
took awhile before people started to ask why they couldn’t see the
wood, and we started talking about using woods that were more
demanding to put a finish on. The spruce material on the body of
that Artist guitar that we sent you is very difficult to sand and
finish, and although it may sound paradoxical to you, the softer the
wood the more challenging it is to cut and finish the material. Try
cutting a marshmallow with a dull knife. The term tone wood is
almost meaningless… I mean, a weed in your garden could be almost
anything… if you’re growing strawberries and a rose pops up, that
could then be considered a weed (laughs). As far as wood is
concerned, each kind of wood (and each board) has its own family
vibe, and you start to find that out as you pick up the wood as a
board. The more you work with it, the more you understand about it,
but one of the things that you find out as a guitar maker is that
there are so many things that make up the character of each type of
wood that can’t be measured with a scale or a hardness meter.
There’s stuff that’s happening inside the material – the way it
bounces, the way it deforms and returns to shape pretty much on a
microscopic level, all determines how the material is going to
respond. Sometimes you want to choose a material that tends to be
especially homogenous – particularly for a neck. Your are placing a
huge set of demands on this little tiny piece of wood you are using
for the neck, and you would like to depend on that material to
behave in a predictable way – to resist the bending forces imposed
on it in a predictable way that you can accommodate. For the body,
you have more choices since the body is not as critical as an
engineering member. For example, you could take one of our guitars
and saw chunks off it and its character won’t change dramatically as
long as the structure between the bridge and the neck remained
intact. I know… so certainly the choice of wood has a major role in
tone production, but in a way the neck is a sleeper – people don’t
talk about the neck – everybody talks about the body as if it’s
doing all of the work and the neck is just something you stuck on
there and held in your hand. Consider that every time you move your
hand on the neck and grab it in a different place, you are
dramatically changing the physical characteristics of the
instrument. The difference between holding it at the neck and not
holding it with this big gooey bag of protoplasm with bones in it is
dramatic. Listen to a guitar in a neck block being strummed versus a
guitar up against a human, pressed against his belly, right forearm
clamping the guitar up against him and his left hand damping the
neck – it’s a huge difference.
TQR: We
(and a lot of others) have often noted the relationship of the mass
of a guitar neck to tone…
Let me suggest to
you that it’s not mass that does it – it’s thickness from front to
back, and here’s why… Any mechanical engineer will verify that the
stiffness of a beam (which they would call a guitar neck) is
modified by the cube of its thickness. In other words, if you take a
2x4 and you lay it down flat and stand on it, then turn it on edge
where it’s twice as thick, it’s not twice as stiff – it’s 2x2x2
times as stiff. The mechanical speak is that the stiffness varies
with the cube of the beam depth. That means that when you take a
guitar neck and add some material to it, you don’t make it a little
bit stiffer – you make it hugely stiffer, and that’s what we
do with the composite materials in the Fly guitar. It allows us to
make a slender neck that behaves like a big, fat neck.
TQR:
Without any variation from instrument to instrument?
No, they are
still handmade and there are little variations. We have CNC machines
that cut them out, but the details are created by people and their
hands. Up until Parker guitars was started, I had never made
anything the same way twice in my life (laughs).
TQR: That’s
the challenge in any manufacturing environment isn’t it – achieving
consistency?
Yeah, but also
design. All those slab necks that everybody had to have in the ‘80s
– where are they now?
TQR: So
back to tone woods…
Yeah, the neck,
the stiffnesses and mass at the end of the neck (peghead) and the
neck-to-body union, whatever that is – those things have a huge
affect on the way that the instrument can respond and conserve
energy, which is what sustain is all about – the conservation of
energy. The energy has to go somewhere. If the string’s
vibration is absorbed by the body of the guitar then we don’t have
sustain. Physics again, but around the shop we playfully refer to
each other as guitar scientists.
TQR: Your
bridges are made from aluminum – again, not by accident…
I’m often quoted
at the shop for having said, “You can’t make an exceptional sounding
instrument out of indifferent sounding materials.” If you pick up a
material and hit it with a hammer and it doesn’t sound great and put
a smile on your face, don’t build anything out of it! When you take
one of our bridges and whack it with your thumb, a piece of wood, or
anything, it has to sing. Especially for the bridge – it has to be
lively and conservative of energy. It can’t be an absorber of
energy.
TQR: And
the alloy that you use is crucial…
Yep, and it’s not
just the alloy – there’s heat treating stuff that we do – we played
around with this for a very long time. Not to point out defects in
other instruments, but let me just say in a generic way that many
bridges in high-quality guitars are made out of material that
doesn’t sound the slightest bit good.
TQR: They
suck tone…
Exactly – they
absorb energy, which is the last thing you want from your bridge.
TQR: Pretty
guitars in which the crucial hardware that influences tone is merely
an afterthought driven by cost, cheaper being better…
Yeah, like
choosing your wife solely by how she looks in a bathing suit – nice
if you can get the entire package, but generally not how it’s done
if you want the best possible outcome.
TQR: But
people eat with their eyes… Any other comments about wood?
Well, like I said
in our catalog, each type of wood has its own tribal song, and
different boards of the same wood all sound like they know each
other, even though they vary to some degree. We already make guitars
out of basswood, poplar, mahogany, spruce and maple…
TQR: And
ash…
Yeah, for the
Nite Fly, but the baby is the Fly, where all of the good stuff comes
together from everything I developed in 1993. The Nite Fly was
designed to appeal to different people. For one thing, you can
install different pickups with no problem, or any number of pickups.
The core in the neck is mahogany and it’s a little bigger, and we
started out with basswood in the neck and switched to mahogany for
reasons of sound. With the character of the bolt-on joint and the
way the neck and body interact it just sounded better. I really feel
strongly about this stuff. My group…my company could take any
electric guitar made anywhere in the world and create drawings for
it, create programs for a CNC machine, create a manufacturing series
of steps and make the guitar to a standard that meets or exceeds the
current standard by which that guitar is now made. And I can say
with a great deal of confidence that no one could make our
guitar – they couldn’t make one.
TQR: In
part because you had been testing theories for so long prior to
actually tooling up and building the Fly…
Yeah, since 1981
– just trying to explore the form. I got hooked on poplar for these
quick sketches because it sounds good…
TQR: Most
people would turn their noses up at poplar.
Yeah, it’s
believed that poplar isn’t a wood that a real instrument maker would
use, but it’s cheap, it’s real easy to get wide boards, it’s easy to
work with… when you try and make something fast like I was for
sketching out prototypes, it’s really nice when the material doesn’t
fight you. The only thing you can make fast out of curly maple is a
fire – it’s the most ass-kicking stuff – it’s just awful.
Poplar is kind of medium density, medium hard, and while I was
making the prototypes to prove concepts on the necks I was thinking,
man, this stuff goes! I fell in love with this amazing poplar
material. That was the kind of encouragement I was getting for using
poplar in the early ‘80s. We make no apologies for using poplar. I
was making long-scale basses that weighed five pounds… and they were
singing. Guys would just hold them and their jaws would drop,
and that was the kind of encouragement I was getting in the early
‘80s. Now, the problem with making guitars for guitar players is
that unless you’re building something that looks like a Stratocaster
or a Les Paul, it’s really an uphill battle – even from world-class
musicians who should know better. “I don’t play anything that was
made after 1960.”
TQR: Well,
the guitar world is like that and we do tend to get stuck in that
groove of what’s vintage and cool. Guys from our generation like the
old classic designs – me included.
Yeah, you know,
when I was in New York I was working for guys with the wackiest
haircuts, hardware on their lips, stuff on their faces, trying to be
as different as they possibly could, yet they wouldn’t play a guitar
built after 1960. Hell, they were built after 1960, so what’s
up with that? I felt like saying, “You’re not paying attention.” But
the bass players didn’t have that problem – they usually had their
eyes closed listening to what was going on while the guitar players
were busy looking in the mirror, dressing up cute, you know. Working
on a look, while the bass players were working on creating a groove
with the drummer that was so good that no one would ever want to
play without them again (laughs). And also, the guitar players
didn’t have their eyes closed and they weren’t looking at the guitar
– they were looking at this tangled mess of crappy little stompboxes
on the floor in their quest for tone. They didn’t know what their
guitars sounded like, which was not the case with the bass players,
so it was natural to start with those guys. It’s not a criticism,
and I’m not mad about any of this stuff – but it made me start with
focusing on the bass –if you can build a great sounding bass, you
can build a great sounding guitar.
TQR: Why
aren’t you building basses?
Well…back in the
day when it was just me and a shop full of junk and you wanted a
5-string bass, I’d say great. That’s an easy job as a one-off or in
small production, but for manufacturing there are huge problems.
Here’s one of the problems – now, what is a bass today? Does it have
five, six, or seven strings? How do you design the string spacing?
Should the neck be narrow or wide, and what about scale length – 34”
, 35”, 36”?
TQR: How about a two string bass
and lets just encourage all bass-playing brothers to stay down there
on the bottom. Seriously, the market for bass doesn’t present the
same economic potential, does it?
Sadly, no, and
it’s a shame because I love the electric bass, and it has huge
potential for further development that hasn’t really been looked
at. When I got started with all of this it was clear that the bass
players were the most open and they also had the biggest problems.
Like Anthony Jackson was trying to play this bass that weighed 5,000
pounds and his main complaint to me was that he’d go to a session
and his leg would literally fall asleep after 5 minutes. Then he’d
put it on his left leg while his right leg woke up, you know? I just
thought that was nonsense – this isn’t the way to solve this
problem. The difference between mass and rigidity is an important
difference.
TQR: Isn’t
there also some element of magic that can occur – and element that
no one fully understands?
I’m there – I
would always agree with that. I had a couple of friends in Rochester
who were interested in basses, and one of them was the son of a very
famous guy who was the principal bass player in the Rochester
Philharmonic. His father had a beautiful gigantic Victorian house
and there were 300 year-old basses literally in every corner of the
house. Well, one night a group of us gathered there and we had
perhaps one hundred old bass bows from around the turn of the
century and the 19th century, and we were weighing them
and measuring their point of balance and percussion, playing them
with different basses…talk about magic. I was stunned – I was
literally speechless at the end of the night at how different each
bow made the basses sound.
TQR: For no
explicable reason?
None – completely
inexplicable – there are all of these variables and who knows how to
sort them all out? I think that really great instruments of any kind
exhibit a complexity that almost makes them anthropomorphic… It’s
like you’re walking down the street and here’s a person that looks
like this and another one like this, and here’s one that is your
best friend…someone who will see you through thick and thin – that
kind of magic. The more people tune into subtleties, the more
subtleties there are to experience, so for guys like you and me…
yeah, whatever you want to call it, there is something that you
aren’t measuring that people aren’t going to be able to measure.
TQR:
And you have to try to listen to as many instruments as you possibly
can. Are you happy with what you’ve accomplished with Parker
Guitars?
Yes, I am, but
I’m glad that I wasn’t ten years younger when I started this,
because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been happy.
TQR: Why?
Because I didn’t
know enough then. I can still look at the Fly today, but earlier I
didn’t know how to connect the dots. Remember me telling you about
drawing a peghead and gritting my teeth? I probably wouldn’t have
been happy with it. Some of the elements of this instrument are
verging on 20 years old and the whole is at least 10 years old and
it still hangs together – I like it. I’m under no illusions that
everything about the guitar is perfect, but it’s a very high-quality
instrument and it’s consistently built to higher specifications than
other people aspire to.
TQR: We
found them to be extremely versatile as well.
That’s Larry
Fishman – 80% of the world uses his products for good reason.
TQR: What
would you like to achieve in the future?
It’s a little
frustrating because I can’t really discuss what’s going on, but the
people that have been exposed to these new projects are very excited
about them.
TQR: How
long will we have to wait to find out?
Answering that is
always a loser – I’ve been promising people basses for seven years
(laughs).
TQR: Do you
ever walk over to the line and just pull guitars off and look at
them?
Oh, yeah, all the
time. I’m here every day. One of the things we’ve managed to do is
reduce the time required in the manufacturing process by improving
our efficiency, so we’ve actually cut the number of employees we
need over the years and also raised our pay scales. It’s all about
the people – in the end they make the products that have made the
company successful.
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