More progress has been made on the 13-string arch guitar, with no hollow arm, an 8 string guitar neck, and 5 subs.  Whew, sometimes its hard to describe one harp guitar to the next, and this type is very unique and have been called “Romantic Guitars” and “Arch Guitars” but is of course in the same class with harp guitars.  I think this will be a great design, a good sounding instrument, it will offer the additional strings, but not be as cumbersome to wield it or travel with.  These are all great features.  Among them also is the cutaway allowing greater access to the higher frets, an angled bridge to give the sub bass strings some extra scale length, figured redwood top sheet for a warmer and richer acoustic sound, and black walnut back and sides.  More pictures will be coming soon…

I know this instrument will sound great acoustically, but hey, this is the 21st century, we have technology that can amplify it to the crowd if need be.  As I have been told, “your sound is your pickup.”  We have worked with just about every kind of pickup system in conjunction with a harp guitar with varying degrees of success.  The more pickups I hear, the more I like a natural sounding passive piezo contact pickups installed in the correct spots on the sound board.  I have found this to produce the most accurate acoustic reproduction of strings through a speaker system.