Ken Parker is best known for shaking up the electric guitar world
with his revolutionary Parker Fly in the early 1990s. Having sold
Parker Guitars in 2004 (to US Music, makers of Washburn and
other brands), he has returned to his first love—hand-building
acoustic archtops in the solitude of a one-man shop. Parker's
archtops, like his radical electrics, hardly follow any existing mold,
and he continues to pursue his mission to explore the unrealized
potential of guitar design. Fusing aerospace materials with fine
woods and old-world craftsmanship, Parker's archtops are
featherweight, expressive, loud, and versatile. He believes that a
properly designed archtop guitar is the true universal steel-string,
suitable for any style of music.
Parker is a guitar iconoclast who has spent his life questioning
conventions, but there's method to his madness and a sound
reason behind every approach. Raised on Long Island, New York,
Parker, now 55, worked in a Rochester, New York,
grandfather-clock factory in his early 20s and began building banjos
and other stringed instruments while working with noted
furniture-maker Richard Newman. Guitar lessons led to an
obsession with archtop guitars, and after building one, he moved
back to Long Island to make more, sharing a shop with a lute
maker in the mid-'70s. From 1979 to 1983, he repaired guitars and
other stringed instruments at Stuyvesant Music in Manhattan, then
spent years in his own shop studying the development and
construction of violins, cellos, and especially Renaissance lutes,
which are often built of incredibly thin and lightweight veneers,
reinforced with linen or even papier-mâché. Using a shell of carbon
and glass fibers, he developed the Parker Fly and continues
exploring similar ideas with his line of handmade acoustic archtops.
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