Carl Barney 17″ 7 Seven String Archtop Guitar w/ case

Product Description

This is a 17″ all carved 17” 7 string archtop #92 – beautiful  woods and  design. -set 7 string humbucker pickup.The top is adirondack (Red) spruce. Flame maple back and sides and ebony fingerboard. The binding is maple.
Carl Barney started building guitars in the 1960’s  Self taught – and his builds have just improved with each additional guitar. This one is a beauty in design with a beautiful voice and a joy to play.“All guitars are handcrafted by me in my workshop. Since the mid-1970s, I have been searching and stockpiling fine instrument woods. In 1976, I purchased a good-sized quantity of Gabon ebony, as well as Brazilian and Indian rosewood. I currently uses figured woods for all models, and I have a supply of figured maple for special commissions.
Studying with Salvador, who was teaching jazz guitar at the University of Bridgeport, Barney, also good woodworker, decided to try to make his own instrument in 1968.I let Sal try it, and he had a lot of notes on ways I could improve it,” he said. “The second one I made, he had a smaller list of notes. The third one, he bought.
I have built over eighty archtop guitars. Although archtops have been my main focus since 1974, I have also built over one hundred classical, flat-top acoustics, and solid body electrics since the mid-1970s
The ones I’m building today sound better than the ones I was building 10 years ago, and that was after 25 years of building guitars,” he said. “A lot of the makers today build beautiful-looking guitars, but they don’t know how to alter the sound as they make them.”  – Carl BarneyBut that hands-on, self-taught approach means that after more than 40 years building guitars, Barney knows what goes into each one, how to make them look and how to make them sound.  And he’s getting better at it.
He would actually  choose the logs that he thinks are the best — straight-grained, without knots or flaws.
Barney will have those logs shipped to a sawmill in Massachusetts, where he will saw them himself. Because he knows exactly what cut he wants, it’s easier for him to do his own sawing, he said. He will bring those red spruce boards back to his house and age them, then finally rough them out and sell unfinished tops to other makers, “That’s the wood Stradivarius used,” Barney said. The curly maple is used for the sides. Because other woods that guitar makers have used, like mahogany, are no longer being legally exported, Barney has also become a supplier of legally imported exotic woods, such as bubinga from Africa. In his shop, he has a beautiful guitar with fancy bubinga veneer work on its neck.
The money Barney makes by selling wood to other instrument makers allows him to keep the prices on his own instruments relatively low. A Carl Barney archtop guitar costs between $5,000 and $7,000
specs, below:• Top-Spruce
• Back & Sides- Maple
• Fingerboard- Ebony
• Tailpiece- Ebony
• Pickguard- Ebony
• Nut Material- Bone
• Nut Width- 2″
• Scale Length- 25.5″
• Lower Bout Width- 17″
• Number of Frets- 22
• Fret board Radius- 14′
• Body Depth- 3″
• Pickup- Hand wound KA PAF O HB
• Case- Yes

Additional Information

Product Enquiry