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At least some of Szabo's albums have him playing a pu-equipped archtop, though. He was one of the early users of controlled feedback.
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Gabor gets a very nice sound with his flattops, albeit he is amplifying them with a DeArmond sound hole pickup. On all the live videos I have seen, that's what you're hearing. But he's not playing in the un-amplified group situation.
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The nylon strings remind me of why I like the TI flats on my Sweet 16 and Le Grand, both of which are great acoustic archtops .....
The annoying bright tones are tamed and the bass frequencies come out a little more. At least that's the way I hear it.
I have some John Pearse (80/20 IIRC) on my Campellone acoustic archtop and they do pretty well, too, now that they've had some time to mellow a little .... when I received the Campellone it had bronze strings on it and I really didn't like those
I need to try the Martin monel next
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I'll add what other people have said
A: string an archtop with heavy strings like Eddie Lang would have used. Then
B: see which gets lost in a band situation and which is more audible
Personally, I can't stand the sound of that dreadnaught in the opening video: it's all booming bass and bright treble: it's got a heavily scooped out midrange. lots of people love that sound--it's the sound of black face fender amps, for example. I dislike it. It's da bomb in a bluegrass jam when there's no bass player, I guess, or if you are accompanying yourself while you sing. I find they are terrible for chord melody because you always need to baby the bass strings. An om size martin is much better, to my ears. But I'm sure you can do it and more power to you.
But the archtop was developed for jazz bands where a banjo was to annoying and plinky but you still wanted some of the chop of a banjo strum
The attack on an archtop is different: i like that attack profile but clearly most people prefer the longer sustain and less percussive attack of flattops. Good for them!
A standard argument is that the jangle people love in flatops just becomes annoying if you start playing a lot of chords with close or semi-dissonant intervals. I find that to be true. in my experience I have a harder time playing jazz on an jangly guitar, just like I have a hard time playing "jazz chords" with a lot of distortion.
But far and away my favorite guitar for fingerstyle jazz is a Gitane D-hole semer style. I know you are only supposed to play like Django on those things but they sound great played fingerstyle.
There's no right or wrong here. Play whatever style you want on whatever instrument you want.
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Well Maccaferri was a classical guitarist.
Selmer style guitars were widely used in dance bands etc in Europe as American archtops were hard to get hold of. It's only more recently that they have become the preserve of GJ players.
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In a big band, the guitar is part of the rhythm section, not part of the melody-playing sections. It's sole purpose is to provide rhythmic drive. Tonal beauty has nothing to do with it. There is no need for sustain, nor for full chords. Flat-top guitars just can't do the job as well as an archtop. If they could, they would have been used. Musicians use, and bandleaders demand, what works.
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As Christian pointed out upstream, in an acoustic setting arch tops project better (and farther) than flattops.
Having played in a few bluegrass groups in my youth I quickly learned that the carved instruments, mandolin and fiddle, will bury a flattop.
Another possibility is that due to construction differences, flattops tend to be bass-heavy whereas a well-built arch top has an evenness of tone through all registers.
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Yeah, I don't own an arch top. Lot of flat tops though. From what I understand , the standard size flattop, the dreadnought, became "the thing " back in the early days of radio ? The story I heard was that they wanted more bass for the single microphone used with country or bluegrass groups. The more bass the better. of course that's a specific stylistic thing, if you listen to that kind of music.
Anyway, it became the standard at some point , but it's a VERY unbalanced sound , especially if you're strumming full chords , especially anything with any dissonance or mid range color. Basically a bluegrass thing. As a result, recording engineers had to do all kinds of EQ-fu to get any kind of decent sound for strummers playing dreadnoughts for other styles. Of course, nowadays, the standard is just to begin with a modern instrument which is flatter, EQ-wise, to start. It's why I got the current guitar I have, because I started recording.
To do a real apples to apples comparison, you'd have to start with something other than a dreadnought, and with a player who had spent a lot of time on each respective instrument. There's a perception bias around volume and bass response. If you play acoustic on a dreadnought , your ears get used to it, and you kind of learn to play things which sound good on THAT instrument.
Anyway, one time we had a guy in the store playing an entry-level solid top dreadnought , and I pointed him to another instrument which was much better . He played it for about 15 seconds and said that he "he didn't play crap like that". Sneered at it, because his blue shuffle didn't sound as good I guess. Bass equals volume (and tone apparently) when you're used to hearing that way. I'd assume that there are similar biases if you haven't played equal amounts of archtop /flattop or steel string/nylon string etc. etc. Each instrument has its own voice.
Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 01-20-2017 at 07:04 PM.
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One other thing, generally, in music, there is a perceived accent with certain types of release. You hear it especially in the music of organ players in jazz, where they don't have a lot of dynamic possibilities other than duration and texture. I would assume that the instrument with the cleanest sound on the type of release that you're aiming for with big-band comping is going to be perceived as "louder" as well.
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