Tom Ribbecke built his first guitar in his dorm room in 1972. Thirty-eight
years later, he says it sometimes feels like the
whole thing was a dream. But recently he got
remarkably concrete proof of how real it was.
“Somebody just sent me back the first steel-
string guitar I ever made, from Holland. It’s
checked all over the place, and I’m looking at
this thing that I made in 1974, and I’m going,
‘I didn’t dream this—it actually did happen!’”
Between 1972 and 2010, Ribbecke has
covered a lot of ground in the guitar world.
Starting with solidbodies—“because they’re
easy”—he was quickly enamored with the way
steel-string tops vibrate. “I became fascinated
with what I started to call the ‘z axis.’ When
you look at the way the top behaves on a gui-
tar as an energy machine, we generally look at
whether it’s flat or arched—but almost nobody
screws around with that axis, the actual carving
or shape of it. I became uniquely aware, because
I’ve always been fascinated with physics, that
the top of the guitar is really a radiator, and the
soundhole is really a port for bass. The guitar is
really a speaker enclosure.”
Though this discovery affected all of
Ribbecke’s subsequent designs, including the
thinline and flattop models he still offers, it
was especially instrumental in Ribbecke’s famed
Halfling model. For archtop aficionados, it’s
no stretch of the imagination to say that the
Halfling represents a revolution in archtop tech-
nology—the culmination of 30 years of experi-
ence, research, observation, and a profound
desire to contribute something truly meaning-
ful to the development of the instrument. “I
looked around and saw a lot of incredible steel-
strings that were mostly reduxes of Martins and
Gibsons,” Ribbecke recalls. “But when I started
playing the archtop, it became clear to me that
the instrument was really undeveloped, really in
its infancy. Archtops started with Lloyd Loar,
and they’re less than 100 years old as a real
design. I felt that there was room to innovate
in that area, and I became incredibly fascinated
with the structural challenge of building an
archtop guitar.”
Tom Ribbecke, head of Ribbecke Guitars and
Ribbecke Guitar Corporation, at his shop in
Healdsburg, California.
to be home. Being out on the road with young
bands was really exciting, and I was a pretty good
player, but the truth of the matter is that lifestyle
was not really suited for my personality. My mar-
riage and my desire to be home just took over.
And I made guitars because I didn’t think the
guitars I was playing were good enough—which
is kind of the megalomaniacal, young guitar-
maker syndrome.”
It never occurred to Ribbecke to not build
guitars once he’d made up his mind to do it.
“My father infused me with this ability to make
things,” he says. “If I thought I could do it, I
could just do it. I didn’t think there was any
reason that you couldn’t make something if you
just saw it. That’s what he gave me by way of
encouragement—I saw him doing it. My brother
was an MIT engineer and my father was a chem-
ist, so I’m sort of ‘the artist,’ but I still have all of
Even so, commissions started coming in from
the repair shop he opened on San Francisco’s
Guerrero Street. “I would lure customers in,
refret their guitars, repair them,” he reminisces.
“And I began to sell instruments most handily
that way, because I had a little storefront window
I could put a little solidbody guitar in, and one
thing led to the next. By about the second year
of making, I became fascinated with the science
of acoustics.”
The first innovation Ribbecke made waves
with was the Sound Bubble steel-string. In fact,
he says that’s what led to “the whole Halfling
thing.” Sound Bubbles looked like conventional
steel-strings with a little bubble carved in the
bass side of the soundboard. They had a natural
flanged sound, but didn’t have the huge bass
response that Ribbecke and his partner at the
time, Charles Kelly, were hoping for. “I still
didn’t know what the hell I was doing at that
age,” he says with a laugh, “but I built a lot of
those guitars—they still come back to me. There
are collectors of those instruments, and they have
a unique and beautiful sound, but I never felt
that was an idea that I truly realized.”
Conceptualizing a Texturizing Machine
Growing up in New York, Ribbecke got his
hands on a D’Angelico early on. “I can never forget the moment they handed me that guitar and
I strummed a chord on it. It changed my life,”
he says. “It was like a George Gobel-y kind of
D’Angelico, and it was the most incredible thing
“I made guitars because I didn’t think the
guitars I was playing were good enough—
which is kind of the megalomaniacal, young
guitar-maker syndrome.”
Double-majoring in music theory and communi-
cations, Ribbecke spent most of his college career
at the Newhouse School of Syracuse University
playing rock ’n’ roll in the dozens of roadhouses
in and around New York State. When he got out
of college, he moved to San Francisco, played in
club bands, and was on the road quite a bit. “But
I was always a pretty grandfatherly guy—I like
that scientific imperative. I grew up with it.”
But very few guitar-building resources were
available when Ribbecke got started. “In those
days, there was an Arthur Overholtzer book
[Classic Guitar Making], which was as ponder-
ous as Arthur was himself. There was a David
Russell Young book [The Steel String Guitar:
Construction & Repair] about steel-string guitars,
and the [Hideo] Kamamoto book, which was
called Complete Guitar Repair. I spent six months
in the library, and there was no one to study
with around me. There was literally nobody
doing this that I could find.”
I’d ever heard—but I still heard the pinched-off,
nasal bass that led me to this sense that maybe
there was something I could do that was better.”
He began turning the problem around in his
mind, but it was years before all the pieces of
the puzzle would fit together. “I loved archtop
guitars, but I hated the thought that they didn’t
have any bass response. I built my first archtop
with a plywood top sometime around 1980 or
’ 81, and once I did that I became so fascinated
that I started making a 335-type guitar that I
still make to this day, the Testadura—which is
an archtop in solidbody clothing. But once I
