Archtop Baritone

$3,695.00

Tag: Original Available

Categories: 27" scale, Baritone Guitar, Hollow-Body, Pro

A 27-inch-scale seven-string baritone built around a 1950s Harmony archtop body and a beam from my sister’s old futon frame, with a full-size onboard NUX Mighty 8 BT amp.

Archtop Baritone combines a 27-inch-scale, 7-string baritone neck with the body of a small 1950s Harmony archtop. The original body was narrowed to accommodate the Rubÿtone beam construction while retaining the archtop’s f-holes and vintage character.

The beam came from my sister’s old futon frame, with reclaimed spruce from my brother’s old stair treads used for trim. An adjustable ebony archtop bridge and trapeze tailpiece preserve more of the traditional archtop vocabulary, while the onboard NUX Mighty 8 BT MKII and large speaker take the instrument in a very different direction.

The current pickup is a Seymour Duncan ’59 humbucker at the neck. I designed the guitar with room to develop the pickup system further and have long imagined it with three rail humbuckers mounted beneath Jazzmaster pickup covers—a combination that would fit naturally onto the Rubÿtone beam while giving this unusual 7-string baritone an equally unusual pickup arrangement.

Archtop Baritone is where an old hollow-body form meets a much more modern Rubÿtone: seven strings, baritone scale, onboard amplification and reclaimed structural materials, without losing the f-holes that made the old Harmony body worth saving in the first place.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Baritone Guitar
Approach	Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod
Construction	Cantilevered, Hollow-Body
Body	50' Harmony Acoustic
Beam	Spruce Stairtread, Futon Frame
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Modified Headstock
Scale Length	27.5"
Number of Frets	24
Bridge	Ebony Archtop Bridge
Tailpiece	Trapeze Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Humbucker
Middle Pickup	Humbucker
Bridge Pickup	Humbucker
Pickup Switch	3-Way Toggle
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Paddle- Style Pointer
Amplifier	NUX Mighty 8-BT
Power Supply	Computer Back-Up Battery

Archtop Baritone

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.19 / 10

331 / 360 points

playing

Fun to Play

The first test is whether the guitar makes you want to keep playing it. A high score means the instrument feels inviting, responsive, and rewarding rather than merely interesting to look at. The best examples have enough soul that you forget you are evaluating them and simply keep going.

Playability

Measures how naturally the instrument responds to ordinary playing technique across the neck. Action, fretwork, neck feel, access, and setup should work together without asking the player to compensate for the design. A strong score means the unusual construction never becomes an excuse for compromised playing.

Ergonomics

Considers how comfortably the instrument sits against the body, hangs from a strap, and positions the hands. Weight distribution matters as much as total weight, especially when found objects or onboard amplification shift the center of gravity. The most artful solutions make an unconventional shape feel surprisingly natural.

Tone Quality

Judges the character, clarity, richness, and usefulness of the instrument’s core sound. The goal is not one supposedly perfect tone, but a voice with musical identity and enough detail to reward attentive playing. The highest scores go to guitars whose sound has real soul rather than merely acceptable frequency response.

Tonal Versatility

Measures how many genuinely useful sounds the instrument can produce rather than simply counting switches and settings. Different pickup combinations and controls should create musically distinct choices that a player would actually use. A clever circuit scores higher when its versatility feels purposeful instead of complicated for its own sake.

Amplification

Evaluates how convincingly the guitar performs through its intended amplification system, whether external or built in. Output, clarity, noise, feedback behavior, and usable volume all matter. For self-amplified Rubÿtones, a high score means the amplifier feels integrated into the instrument rather than attached as an afterthought.

build

Fit & Finish

Evaluates the precision and care visible in joints, edges, fretwork, hardware installation, surfaces, wiring, and final setup. Handmade character is welcome; carelessness is not the same thing as character. A strong score shows experienced workmanship while allowing the object to retain the marks and soul of its previous life.

Portability

Measures whether the instrument’s mass and dimensions make sense for the way it is meant to be used. A guitar with an onboard amp may reasonably weigh more, but every added ounce should earn its place. High scores reward designs that are easy to carry, hold, busk with, or live with without sacrificing the idea.

Reliability

Rates the likelihood that the guitar will keep working properly through normal playing, transport, and repeated use. Structural joints, wiring, controls, hardware, and power systems should feel dependable rather than experimental in the risky sense. A high score means the wit of the design is backed by experienced engineering.

Repairability

Considers how sensibly the instrument can be serviced when something eventually wears out or fails. Standard parts, accessible wiring, replaceable components, and understandable construction all help. The strongest designs are inventive without turning a future repair into an archaeological excavation.

Solutions

Scores the quality of the solutions used when unconventional materials create unconventional problems. Beam placement, neck angle, pickup clearance, feedback, balance, and internal packaging are all opportunities to demonstrate experience. High scores go to solutions that are technically sound and artful enough to look inevitable afterward.

Integration

Measures how successfully all the unrelated parts become one coherent working instrument. Neck, beam, body, hardware, electronics, amplifier, and found objects should cooperate mechanically and visually. The best integrations have a kind of soul: the parts stop looking assembled and start looking as though they found each other.

design

Innovation

Measures whether the guitar introduces a genuinely fresh idea, solution, relationship, or way of thinking about an instrument. Novelty alone is not enough; the innovation should improve the object, deepen the concept, or open a useful new possibility.

Shouldn’t Work

Rewards designs that appear improbable but succeed because the underlying engineering is sound. The wit comes from the gap between what your eyes expect and what your hands and ears discover.

Beauty

Judges visual appeal without assuming that beauty must mean polished, conventional, or expensive. Proportion, material, color, age, texture, and restraint can all create beauty in very different ways.

Sculpture

Considers the guitar as a three-dimensional object even when nobody is playing it. Silhouette, negative space, depth, structure, and the relationship between functional parts should reward viewing from more than one angle.

Coherence

Measures whether the many materials, colors, shapes, and components read as one intentional composition. A Rubÿtone can be busy, strange, or witty without looking accidental.

Relic

Rates the visual and emotional value of genuine age, wear, patina, scars, repairs, and evidence of earlier use. Authentic history carries more weight than artificially manufactured distress.

concept

Stage Presence

Measures how strongly the instrument communicates from across a room or under performance conditions. Silhouette, scale, color, movement, and unusual construction can all contribute before a note is heard.

Stands Alone

Judges whether the instrument feels complete and compelling without requiring a long explanation of why it matters. The story may deepen the experience, but the object should already make a persuasive case visually and musically.

Material Story

Considers how much meaning comes from the history and previous purpose of the materials themselves.

Transformation

Measures how completely the original object has been given a convincing second identity without erasing where it came from.

Boneyard Score

Rates how deeply the instrument embodies the practice of building from saved, secondhand, leftover, or previously overlooked materials.

Necessity

Asks whether each major component has a reason to be there. Extra hardware, controls, decorative pieces, and technology should contribute to function, story, balance, or visual composition.

personality

Story

Measures the strength of the narrative carried by the guitar’s materials, development, accidents, people, places, and decisions.

Surprise

Rates the number and quality of discoveries the instrument offers after the first glance.

Conversation

Measures how naturally the guitar makes people curious enough to ask questions.

Cool Factor

Captures the difficult-to-measure quality that makes an instrument desirable before every reason can be itemized.

Identity

Measures how immediately the guitar feels like itself rather than a variation of something more familiar.

Rubÿtone DNA

Rates how clearly the instrument expresses the recurring ideas behind Rubÿtone: reuse, structural invention, functional sculpture, irreverence, and serious playability.

impact

Humor

Measures whether the guitar contains genuine wit rather than a joke pasted onto an otherwise ordinary object.

Punchline

Judges whether the concept resolves into a satisfying final idea—the moment when the viewer suddenly understands why a particular object, material, or decision is there.

Disdain

Measures the willingness to question inherited rules about what an electric guitar is supposed to look like, contain, or be made from.

Rules

Rates how effectively the instrument departs from established guitar-building conventions while remaining musically and structurally convincing.

Copy Potential

Considers whether the central idea could inspire a new custom build without requiring an exact duplicate of the original.

Evolution

Measures how much useful creative territory remains in the idea after this particular guitar is finished.

THE STORY

If You Like the F-Holes…

I started this one with the body of a small archtop from the Chicago factories of the 1950s. I believe it was a Harmony, and judging by its size it may originally have been intended for kids.

Whatever it was intended for, I liked the way it looked.

Josh had one like it.

The challenge with using an archtop body in a Rubÿtone is that I still wanted the beam to be the structural center of the guitar. Simply attaching the whole body alongside it would have made everything unnecessarily wide, so I took some width out of the old Harmony body to compensate for the beam.

That let me keep the part I really wanted:

the f-holes.

My sister’s old futon frame came through again for the beam. The trim came from another source that has found its way into several Rubÿtones—the spruce left over when my brother replaced the stair treads in his house with oak.

So a 1950s archtop, my sister’s futon and my brother’s staircase all ended up contributing to the same guitar.

Then I took it in a direction that none of those objects could possibly have anticipated.

I gave it a 27-inch-scale, 24-fret, 7-string baritone neck and a large onboard speaker powered by a NUX Mighty 8 BT MKII. An adjustable ebony archtop bridge and trapeze tailpiece keep some of the old archtop language intact, but functionally this has become something very different from the little Harmony it started as.

The pickup arrangement is one part of the guitar that I still consider unfinished.

It currently has a Seymour Duncan ’59 humbucker in the neck position, but I've always wanted to make a set of rail humbuckers using Jazzmaster pickup covers. I like the way those large, flat covers would mount against the beam, and this guitar seems like exactly the right place to explore the idea.

I think it needs three.

That's one of the things I like about Archtop Baritone. From a distance, the f-holes tell you that you already know what kind of guitar you're looking at.

Then you get closer.

Seven strings. Baritone scale. Futon frame. Stair tread. Bluetooth amplifier. Big speaker.

The f-holes survived. Almost everything around them changed.