Ken Parker

http://www.tonequest.com/articles/article23.htm


Ken Parker is the guy who pioneered Parker guitars. This is a very interesting article, he began basically making furniture, and then started builing solid bodies, tool-making...and then began working on the Parker design.

He has some interesting views on tone wood as well. He proposes that thickness from front to back of a piece of wood is what causes a guitar to sound better, not the mass (although the two are proportional).

" 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. "

I also liked this quote:
"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)."

Different strokes for different folks, eh.


Ken also explains how people tend to neglect the tonal contribution of the neck, and just how paramount the neck really is.

I found this to be an interesting read, a lot of things for me to think about.....