I have a couple of Guild Acoustics, but have never played a Guild Archtop. I am curious as to what draws someone to an archtop as opposed to a flat top?
Two pickups make it seem more electric than acoustic. But if that's so, why the hollowbody?
I have played an Ibanez Hollowbody 12-String and pretty much hated it. It seemed oddly balanced to me. Too big to be an electric and too heavy to be an acoustic -- sort of the worst of both worlds. The center of gravity just seemed all wrong -- although maybe I am just used to the feel of an acoustic and didn't give it its fair due. I'm guessing not all of them are like that... But what are the advantages and disadvantages of the archtop (hollow-body or full-on acoustic body).
Is the action more like an electric than an acoustic?
If this has been asked and covered before, just shoot me a link, but I didn't see one.
Thanks!
First of all, acoustic and electric archtops are related, but very different beasts. There are acoustic archtops with pickups, but in use, they compare more to flattops with pickups than with the typical much stiffer, more often than not laminated electric archtops.
You could see acoustic archtops as one of the pre-electric guitar attempts at making guitars louder. Be it archtops, resonator guitars, jumbos, dreadnoughts, they all come from the need for a louder instrument. And where a dreadnought gets it with a bigger body than what came before dreads, making for a bigger overall volume, more projection and more bass, typical prewar archtops did it with a different EQ emphasis : cutting power from emphasis on mostly different shades of midrange frequencies. In a band setting, an acoustic archtop doesn't so much compete with the other instruments in the same frequencies : it punches through the mix with a percussive midrange attack much like a smoother, friendlier, woodier banjo.
Acoustic archtops eventually got amplified, and as music still got progressively louder and louder, the guitars evolved too : top and backs became thicker for feedback resistance and added sustain, pickups went from floating attachments to built in parts of the guitar, both for rigidity, feedback resistance and price, ease of manufacture, the guitars went from solid carved construction to laminated, and eventually in the 50's we got ES335's and their ilk : mostly solidbody guitars dressed up to look like archtops, with a few acoustic attributes in attempts to keep that big fat tone.
Electric archtops are true electric guitars that weren't built to be listened to unamplified - even though some of them still put out a good deal of acoustic volume. But the big arched hollow body makes for an entirely different sound than a solid body, less emphasis on sustain, more on a percussive, fat midrange voice.
Acoustic archtops kept on evolving too, and D'Angelico kind of started the development of an acoustic archtop that wasn't the loud cutting midrange acoustic bark-machine any more, but a stand-alone instrument with a gentler, full frequency, altogether prettier voice.
People still tend to call all kind of archtops and f-hole guitars "Jazz guitars", maybe because they were born in the Jazz age and jazz guitarists still embrace them, but both electric and acoustic archtops are suitable for a lot of different kinds of music.