Before the Ridgewing Guitar there was the Chrysalis Guitar. The Chrysalis was originally designed as an acoustic guitar, with a Velcroed-on Mylar acoustic body. It sounded pretty good, too, and you can hear a very nice recording of it made by the Boston Museum of Fine Art, who has one in their musical instrument collection. About a dozen were made and sold between 2000 and 2005.

Being an instrumental 12-string acoustic player, I had been dreaming about this guitar for twenty years as an acoustic instrument, from original concept right through to creating the Chrysalis guitar.  But most folks found the whole inflatable body thing just a wee bit too weird. Also, it was very hard to hand-make a Mylar balloon for the body that held air, and eventually they all didn’t. So, by default, players instead made use of the little piezo pickup that had originally been put into the bridge as an afterthought, and the guitar became “electric”. And a very austere electric guitar at that, because it had just the bare piezo pickup in the bridge and no other on-board electronics. None. It took me a while to get used to the idea of my Chrysalis as an electric guitar, but I could see that was what I had really created.

The picture here is my first “poster” image of the Chrysalis guitar re-imagined as an electric. All my previous marketing pictures of the Chrysalis guitar up to this point had been of an inflated acoustic. This is an actual photograph I took with photo-shopped background. After some initial despair at having to give up the dream of an inflated acoustic guitar, I found myself increasingly captivated by this new stripped-down guitar animal. The neck and headstock were strong and familiar, serving as a stem on which this grillwork body hung like some weird genetically engineered fruit (Will guitaroids grow on trees some day? Let’s not go there). But the guitar is a tool, and it is not too much of a stretch to think of it as a cooking utensil for musical ideas. And what is a frying pan with a fine grillwork in place of the pan? A popcorn popper.