Pat is one of our favorite people, and just kills it with a sewing machine. Coming from one of the older New Boston families, when Pat stops by, the room erupts with smiles and forceful discussions about important things that just happened. I doubt that Pat ever planned on finding herself at the bleeding edge of guitar technology, but there she stands.

The Ridgewing guitar, is designed as an open platform for continuous hacking, exploration and development, and not just for guitar technologies, but also for looks. I have written elsewhere about the sublime pleasures of taking liberties with the grills with exotic spray paints, but if you want to try out radical new visual styles more easily, quickly and reversibly, leave the spray paint in the cupboard and head over to your local JoAnne’s Fabric Store.

A remarkable property of the Ridgewing guitar is that its open structure invites the whole world of fabric design to be blended into the guitar. It takes just a few minutes and some skill like Pat’s with a sewing machine to attach a strip of Velcro “hook” material to the outer edge of a piece of decorative fabric cut to the shape of the Ridgewing body. This piece can then be stretched over and attached around the body’s back side, where the outer perimeters of the “stock” frames are conveniently lined with Velcro “loop” material for exactly this purpose. This system allows for different fabric backs to be tried on and stripped off about as fast as opening and closing window shades. And the effects can be magical. When lit from the front, as is the case with stage lights, stretched “Metallic” fabrics shimmer and pulsate. Sequins glitter. Sewn-in metallic threads glisten and dance.

This picture is a close-up of the lower bout of the Ridgewing “Techno” prototype, which is tricked out with a Bluetooth controlled LED light show.  The inward-facing white-colored LEDs can be seen attached around the frame in front of the grills, which are mounted from the rear.  The light show controller and power supply are in the black puck visible behind the grill on the right side of the bridge. All of the 135 LEDs are individually programmable for color, brightness and time variation. The fabric back is a see-through metallic fiber gauze covered with tiny colored sequins.

With just window lighting on the shop bench, the guitar looks pretty nice.  The inlay catches the eye because it is a very efficient wide-angle reflector. The 0000-steel wool-buffed carbon fiber surfaces on the frames and bridge reflect the window light with suggestive curves.  The fabric is hard to see.

But then turn on some front lights, and BOOM! It’s Show Time!

The way the sequins glitter and dance as you move your head this way and that doesn’t come through in the picture, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see it either.

In the next picture, the sequin back has been stripped off and a new back put on with some difficult-to-describe faceted shimmering gold fabric. The transparent red pickguard creates a patch of eye-catching bloody gold.

Getting back to the programmable LED array around the frames – because the LEDs point in toward the center rather than out toward the front, they light up the grills and fabric at a low angle, and offer a whole new level of visual extravagance that cannot be achieved with any other guitar. This picture is one frame from a video clip on the website, where the LEDs are pulsing together in time to mimic a heartbeat speeding up and slowing down. 

This last picture is a frame from a video clip where strings of color are chasing each other around the edge of the guitar.

This is fun stuff.