I’m using, it works out to about 25 or 30
pounds of down push. The regular guitar
neck is pulling up on the top and torquing
it like a regular guitar works, and the bass
arm is pushing down to give it a coun-
terbalance. I didn’t have to over-brace the
guitar because of that. I could go lighter
than I would have normally built it.”
The other major reason Greenfield split
the bridge was to get some real separation
between the pickup signals from the guitar
side and the harp side. He worked with
K&K to design a custom pickup system
for the instrument. “Not to do a commer-
cial for K&K, but my experience has been
that the K&K system is a really natural-
sounding system that works really well for
fingerstyle guys,” he says. “It sounds like a
guitar that’s been mic’d. So, using the split
bridge, I was able to use the soundboard
transducer on the guitar part of the instru-
ment, and a custom-made undersaddle
pickup under the bass harp strings.
“The next thing was that I wanted it to
look funky. But I really wanted the guitar—
especially knowing who it was going to—to
be easily serviceable. So a lot of the parts
on that guitar bolt on. Both harp heads are
I build a heavy guitar on purpose.
bolted on, the tailpiece is bolted on, and
the neck is bolted on. So if something fails,
it’ll be easier for me to repair it.”
The entire process of building McKee’s
harp guitar took about two years. “Obviously,
I didn’t work on it constantly, but it took
over a year of design. I made a few drawings,
hung them up on the walls to live with them
in the room for six months. Every time I
passed them I would doodle something else
or sketch something or put a new line in
until I got to the point where it all made
sense.” Greenfield also spent a lot of time
researching, talking to colleagues, reading,
looking at the old instruments, and finally
making some accurate drawings. “Then
I had to figure out the mechanics of how I
was going to build it. That was the hard part.
Because once you have all that figured out,
the rest is just guitar making: You’re setting a
neck, you’re gluing on a bridge, you’re voicing
It took about eight months to build
the guitar, which Greenfield worked on
between other projects. “Delivering the
guitar this past summer to Andy at the
Montreal Guitar Show was very, very emo-
tional for me. It was two years of my life!
I had just given birth to this crazy thing
with two heads, and there was this man
who just picked it up and immediately
tore into it and started making beautiful
music with it. It was certainly a high point
in my career.”
Greener Pastures?
Although Greenfield didn’t tag “so far”
onto the end of the previous sentence
declaring the McKee harp-guitar delivery the highlight of his career, it’s probably safe to say there will be many other
notable moments that could very well rival
that. We’ve only touched on a fraction of
the types of instruments he offers here, so
be sure to check out greenfieldguitars.com
to see delectable renditions of nylon-string
and archtop instruments, in addition to a
wide variety of steel-string guitars.
