7-STRING BOWABLE ARCHTOP GUITAR (ARPEGGIONE)

7-String, 26" scale, bowable archtop guitar. 

Hand-carved spruce top, figured maple sides and back, three-piece neck from mahogany and ipe with an ebony fingerboard. Tailpiece from an unknown hardwood and a rosewood bridge. ​

This was my first fully-acoustic and all-wood instrument started back in 1997 and completed in its first version in 1998. The neck was replaced around 2002, by which time I learned in Carl Thompson's shop a lot more about how to build a much more playable neck! 

This guitar was originally a study in traditional building, and almost all of the original construction was completed with only hand tools. Power tools only touched it during later revisions. ​

This plays perfectly well as a 7-string fretted guitar, but is also built with a sharper neck angle and a more highly radiused fingerboard and bridge to make it closer to a cello layout. The radius is slightly less than a cello so that each string can be bowed individually, but with a little more pressure, one can also bow three-note chords. Its tuning is a standard 7-string guitar tuning but its function also highly emulates a viola da gamba and as a bowed instrument is held in the same position. 

This instrument is now amplified through a simple piezo system. 

Photos by Adrian Buckmaster