realized I could carve and manipulate top plates
to behave in certain ways, I became so fascinated
with the archtop that I kind of never looked
back after that.”
Launching into what he calls his “California
touchy-feely thing” (his shops are located in
Healdsburg, California), Ribbecke begins to
explain a bit of his thought process. “My whole
acoustic paradigm is that guitars are energy
machines. They convert energy from one form to
another, but they’re not very efficient. When you
hear a couple of piano strings vibrating against
each other, they’re tuned to the same pitch, and
you hear the texture that resolves because they
“The concept of the Halfling as a whole, as a piece
of art, is to free the bass side of the soundboard
to be more compliant and still have a instrument
that’s truly an archtop in structure and design.”
are not able to stay perfectly in pitch with each
other. You hear this beating that goes on, and
we hear this as texture. I became aware that
the shape of a guitar top creates an acoustic
texture, and I understood very clearly that there
was some real-time parameter about this. But I
didn’t know how to deal with this concept that
a carved-up part of a soundboard that is much
more arched and much more stiff will actually
excite air at a much higher frequency and much
faster than something that’s flatter and more bass
compliant, like a steel-string guitar.”
Ribbecke’s dissatisfaction with archtop
guitars had to do with one of the things that
makes them do what they were designed to
do, which is cancel bass to create separation of
course—the ability to hear complex close tones.
“Like a minor 9,” says Ribbecke. “You can
hear it in an archtop guitar because the top
is not moving in the 1 kHz range—it’s much
more articulate. It’s much easier to hear com-
plex clusters of notes and chords. So you can
play great jazz chords with very close harmonic
tones. You can still hear each and every note
in the chord. Archtops have great separation
of course, but are nasal in their bass response
because they’re carved up. Bass has a tendency
to shake things in the 1 or 2 kHz range, which
is where most of our information is.”
The steel-string guitar, he continues, “is very
loud and very beautiful, but very hard to dif-
ferentiate when someone is strumming, because
the top is so much freer to move. It’s such a
more expansive and dynamic distance that it can
move. So it sort of overwhelms itself with infor-
mation in the 1 to 2 kHz range, and it becomes
very hard to differentiate every note in a chord.”
Ribbecke’s Halfling is a beautiful hybrid with a
flat top on the bass side, an archtop on the treble
side, and an X-brace structure. Ribbecke explains
that it’s as if “you took a Martin and sawed it in
half, and glued the bass half to an archtop that’s
similarly bisected. You’d have the treble side of
the archtop and the bass side of the steel-string
guitar.” The net result on the Halfling is that the
bass side of the soundboard is more compliant
and rich—able to reproduce the big bass and
deeper, throatier sound—but the carved treble
side allows the instrument to have a great separation of course and behave like an archtop.
“So the Halflings are really archtop guitars
with an enhanced and developed mid and bass
range—without phase cancellation.” Ribbecke
