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Archtop Guitar Design
The first step is to determine the basic outward design of the guitar.
We've decided, (my client and I), to use a 16 inch wide body - certainly
not large as archtops go - we're looking for something with complexity
and balance rather than power and projection.
After playing around with my 'standard' archtop design, I've come up with an
outline that will be the starting point for this guitar.
It's a little smaller than my f-hole
model, and I changed the position of the waist in relation to the bouts in
a way that I think will compliment the oval hole design.
In this first
picture, you can see the initial rough sketch, along with the resulting
template and mold.
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Materials for the Otis Tomas Archtop Guitar
In terms of aesthetics, we decided that for this guitar, the wood itself was to be
the main feature.
The basic design and decorative details were to be kept fairly
minimal, but we wanted to find some highly figured and visually interesting wood.
After some hunting around the web, we finally settled on a set of highly figured
quilted big leaf maple from LMI for the back and sides, and some fine bear claw
spruce from Mario DaCosta for the soundboard. For the decorative details on the
fingerboard, peghead and fittings, we got some beautiful Arizona ironwood burl
from Robert Bradley.
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