The Ridgewing guitar emerged from a confluence of art, technology and fun. This black-on-black body with the clear pickguard is about as close to deadly cool-looking essence of Ridgewing as you can get. The grills, spray-painted black gloss, are identical to those used in the original inflatable Chrysalis acoustic guitar, and were actually made in the original molds. The carbon-fiber epoxy frames are not painted. Instead, the glowing satin finish was created with simple 0000-steel wool on the bare epoxy, and has a wonderful warm feel to it.

Hanging on the bathroom door is a toy guitar clock rescued from the New Boston town dump (officially our “Recycle Center”).  It was procured from a wonderful part of the recycle section where folks leave off good stuff of all kinds, sizes and values for others to pick through, making it a highlight of every Saturday’s dump trip. There is always a lot of kid’s stuff, and occasionally toy guitars like this. Instead of making horrible-sounding electronic music this particular one has a light show you turn on with a knob and the face erupts in a riot of blinking LED’s whose brightness is controlled by the knob. Is it really a guitar, or a guitar-shaped toy? To me it is a guitar, because it definitely pokes that part of me that thinks guitars are fun. Other toy guitars I have picked up there make horrible music and singing when you push big plastic buttons, so I have thoughtfully passed them on to my little grandchildren, who love them as much as their parents hate them. The best performance I have seen was my two-year old granddaughter Ada putting three different ones together on the floor and performing a kind of fire-walking dance on them, creating a glorious cacophony of horrible music and children’s song clips all clashing with each other and putting a look of pure delight on her beautiful little pre-verbal face.

The strange rectangular wooden-body guitar hanging to the right with what looks like a partially deflated Mylar balloon in it is exactly that, and has an interesting technical history. In 1998 this was the key prototype test-bed used in the development of the original inflatable Chrysalis acoustic guitar body to experiment with different grill soundboard designs and the acoustic tones they made. When the mechanical design of the guitar had been figured out to allow the instant disassembly/re-assembly, a key unknown remained in how to design an acoustically acceptable grillwork. How strong should it be? What kind of balloon should be used? How thick should the tendrils be, and what should be their spacing?

This wood body box was equipped with a fabric back held on with Velcro around the edges, just like the Chrysalis guitar body would have. This allowed different combinations of various types of balloons and grill designs to be evaluated for their tonal characteristics. The results were quite remarkable. A grill design with the right mechanical characteristics, which can be seen here, turned out to be a one inch by one-half inch rectangular milled grid of aluminum grill elements with 1.5mm x 2mm vertical oval cross-section, all reinforced with a couple of longitudinal spruce braces. But the amazing thing was the balloons – just about any kind of inflated thing sounded remarkably good, up to and including one of those inflatable vinyl winter sled tubey toys, which was totally bizarre. And the pressure of the balloons pressing against the grills required to be heard was remarkably light.

The best combination for acoustic tone turned out to be a Mylar balloon with the aluminum grill seen here. It was the inflated Mylar membrane that actually created the sound, because a naked grillwork by itself can’t couple to air, but the tone created came from the aluminum, and it was sweet and REALLY LOUD, like a Dobro, but crisper. Astonishingly nice. When Harvey Reid tried out this prototype some time later, at the first strum he let out a delighted laugh. This piece of junky-looking guitaroid really worked.

In the end, the carbon-fiber grills for the Chrysalis guitar were designed with the approximate grill thickness and pitch of this aluminum grill prototype, with some reinforcing tendrils added for strength. Instead of this rectangular grid design, the carbon fiber version was made all artistic and curve-ey and three-dimensional, but the model that worked and led to it was this odd rectangular thing hanging on the wall.

Ever since these early experiments, I have wanted to make an alternative soundboard for a traditional wooden acoustic guitar consisting of this kind of fine aluminum grillwork with a stretched (not inflated) Mylar membrane glued to it. This would be an amazing instrument.