lot more about what you’re doing than you did
when you were an idiot 22-year-old?’”
But the Halfling is more than an archtop
jazz guitar—it’s an instrument that can keep up
with players who play steel-string one minute,
then archtop, then electric guitar. “The modern
guitar players we have today, these guys have
studied. There’s so much information available
on the ’net. We have a new breed of guitar player
who plays standards, plays steel-string guitar,
plays all these different literatures. The quality
of the average guitar player is through the roof
right now, compared to what it was 30 years
ago. I don’t think this Halfling thing would have
worked out were it 15 years ago, but now I think
there’s a market for an instrument that will allow
somebody to do cross-literatures.”
The Halfling Bass is another of Ribbecke’s
corporation—kind of a nutty, alternative corpo-
ration—to build the Halflings. We’ve built and
sold close to a million dollars worth of Halflings
in the last six years. I wanted to rebrand myself
at about a third of the price, wrap in some
technology, really offer something different, and
build them in America. We made a very con-
scious decision not to take this offshore, because
I felt that the technology could be screwed up
very quickly and easily. So we slog along here
making them in America.”
Taking a “guerilla” approach, RGC decided
the best strategy would be to run the business
as lean as possible instead of taking on millions
of dollars in debt. “We took angelic investors
who really believed in the product and started
the company with a little less than $600,000
and ran it on a shoestring with an unbelievable
“I don’t think this Halfling thing would have
worked out were it 15 years ago, but now I think
there’s a market for an instrument that will
allow somebody to do cross-literatures.”
innovations, and it was undertaken in collaboration with bassist Bobby Vega. “He speaks
in a language that’s not like what we speak,”
says Ribbecke with a touch of awe. “He talks
about notes coming from here and here, and he
points to different places. I couldn’t make him
just another big bass that was supposed to be
a guitar, so he waited seven years for this thing
while I tried to figure out what to do to make
this really special for him. Bobby and I worked
very closely. He’s got an incredible bass—it’s
archival—and we took the same dimensions on
the Halfling bass, and we moved the tailpiece
all over the place. I’ve never known anybody
who can hear like him. I think I can hear pretty
well, but he hears things I can’t even begin to
hear. So we worked very closely on this bass
until, as he would say, it ‘fired right’— until it
had this dimension.”
The partnerships that developed between
Ribbecke, Szmanda, and Vega became the energy
behind the Ribbecke Guitar Corporation (RGC).
“Because of luck of the draw—where the econo-
my was when these instruments appeared on the
scene—we were fortunate enough to have people
step forward and invest and help me make these
things. We obtained a patent on it, we had a
group of investors step forward and opened a
crew of people who were all hand-selected—all
of whom are really special. I think that’s why
we’re still here today, because we chose the gue-
rilla method to build this company. If we had
taken venture capital, or if we had taken money
from anyplace else, I think we would be out of
business now.” Ribbecke’s private workshop is
located three miles from the RGC workshop,
but he currently spends 80 to 85 percent of his
time building Halflings.
