Ken Parker, famed luthier, has died | Hacker News Reader

Ken Parker, famed luthier, has died

kenparkerarchtops.com

145 pointsdagmx46 comments

Shame, I'm a huge fan of the Parker Fly.

They're arguably the biggest step forward in electric guitar since the 50s. Lots of new stuff there for the time, some of which became standard years after: stainless steel frets, piezo+magnetic pickups, carbon fiber reinforcement, adjustable vibrato, possibly the most seamless/flattest neck joint ever... not to mention the whole design is amazing.

This video from this guy dropped just two days ago, and explains a lot about the features and constructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S6Cni3nkws

It's a shame they stopped manufacturing after the company was sold. I had one and regret selling, as prices haven't really come down!

Rest in peace and thanks for everything, Mr Parker!

I had my Parker Fly with me at a gig in NYC, when back stage I met Les Paul. He had never seen one, and he admired its radical choices.

So we found a nice big permanent sharpie, and Les Paul signed my Parker Fly.

Les was known for that. I heard a story of him doing a signing and these two guys came and one had a Gibson Les Paul for him to sign. He turns to the other guy there and he said he didn't have a Les Paul, but he had a Strat. Les signed that too and told him "there, now you have a Les Paul".

That’s totally rad. Bummed I never got to see Les play. At least I got to see Dick Dale a couple times.

That’s amazing! From one of the original innovators to one of the most recent.

That is an absolutely amazing story, thank you for sharing it!

Just a note that he continued on his path of innovation w/ Ken Parker Archtops, which he was still involved in building until just before the end. These are $20k+ custom orders so there aren't too many in the wild.

The neck 'join' in particular is wicked: https://kenparkerarchtops.com/guitars2

Wow, so you can adjust action with just a screw at the back? I wish it were that easy on nylon-string guitars instead of having to file and shape nuts and saddles. The last time I made a saddle from a bone blank I spent hours only to find I'd messed the curvature up.

My dad got to play a prototype Parker Fly while doing some collab at the Fishman R&D facility. (I’m not sure many generations, but fishman made the piezo bridge pickup for the more acoustic sound.) Of course this was well before phone cameras but the way he described it with the naturally curved ergonomic neck and stuff made it sound like pure magic. Gotta say, when there was one I could play at my local music shop a couple years later, it didn’t disappoint. Too delicate feeling for me but it felt like the future.

Yeah. I am not the greatest guitar player but once after seeing Pops Staples playing one on TV a little voice in my head told me “get a Parker Fly, you will never need another guitar” … and I ignored it. Shouldn’t have.

the guitar market is very conservative , as can be seen by the fact that the design itself was pretty divisive even if a lot of their innovations have stuck around.

I always though the Fly looked awful but I played one once and it was amazing. If they could've just done that but made it look less like a piece of modern art from Patrick Bateman's apartment, I would've definitely been more interested

I feel like Ken unfortunately started Parker Guitars a decade too late for the 80s and too soon for the technical players of the 2010s.

He also caught mostly the attention of forward-looking players of past decades, rather than new players.

I wonder if he had gone after nu-metal artists like PRS did the brand would have survived.

Pretty much this. They were perfect guitars for the 80s that came out right smack in the middle of 90s grunge. They were shredder guitars right as shredding was going out of fashion.

I loved Parkers, even though I was way more a grunge person than a 80s person, but I'm mainly a bass player, and bass building is generally a lot less conservative than guitar building, and building with more exotic materials wasn't out of style for bass in the 90s, so Parkers kind of felt like a 90s guitar that had been built by a bass company.

I always envied the amount of options bass players had. Even in the 90s there were new brands starting to pop up like crazy. Lakland, Ritter, Tobias, BassLab...

With guitars, apart from the metal guitars, there's only vintage-inspired stuff with either a tune-o-matic or a Wilkinson tremolos... I'm exaggerating but that's indeed what I see for sale on my local shops.

On the other hand we do have Teuffel guitars in Germany, so maybe I should just put up and buy one from Uli Teuffel while he's still young.

My fancy basses are a Lakland and a Sandberg (also German). But even, say, Ibanez was doing a lot of interesting stuff with low-cost instruments in the 90s, and on the high end there was Alembic, Modulus, Fodera, Ken Smith, hell, even Music Man (from Leo Fender), Tobias (and later MTD). Neck-through construction, active electronics, composite bodies, fiberglass necks. I don't want all of those things in my basses, but it was exciting to be able to try them. There was so much experimentation in basses at that time, but it was pretty rare with guitars. Again, Parker seemed to be the only well-known company doing it.

My theory has been that it was that bass guitar is a new instrument. Electric bass really isn't an electric double bass, but electric guitar is an electric version of a steel-string guitar. There was a lot of history and nostalgia in guitar playing, whereas bass was this new thing.

The other part of my theory is that bass amplification demanded it to some extent. Amplifying a bass was hard at the time. And it's come so incredibly far. Guitar players still basically use the same amps they did in 1965. But bass players moved quickly from tubes to transistors, and now to class-d amplifiers, and miniaturized speakers. My 500 watt amp weighs 1.1 kg and fits in the pocket of my gig back, and my 4x5" cab which handles 400 watts of power and goes down to 35 Hz is 30 x 30 x 30 cm and weighs 9.5 kg. Those together are smaller and weigh less than my 15 watt guitar tube amp.

Man I love how pragmatic bass players are. I also have a tiny Class D for my bass (I play a bit of fretless for fun) and it's magical how much better it is than the amps I played in the past. Granted I never had an SVT, but on the other hand my back is thankful for that.

I feel like guitar players are constantly trying to get into the technology but then fashion changes. Grunge for example made everyone sell their racks and shredder guitars.

Now that I think about it, I actually had a POD bean before I even had an amplifier, but then it became unfashionable to not have tube amps among my in-group back then. On the other hand I see lots of touring bands using Kempers, Quad Cortex, Tonex, etc. so maybe the tide has turned! For now!

Similarly, my dad was a luthier for 15 years before passing away to cancer in 2022. In the 5th grade, I wanted to learn guitar, so being the engineer he was, he built one. But needed machines first, and wood, and the garage.

Being an engineer instead of a business-minded operator prevented his work from becoming too well known but the instrument and what he accomplished was special.

I know own the shop, guitars, and everything after his passing - a couple years ago I made a reddit thread asking for help - it blew up and is an interesting read - https://www.reddit.com/r/guitars/comments/1f07f1s/my_dad_lef...

I like to take pictures of products and build websites, unfortunately we just ran out of time.

https://sgg2.webflow.io/

Is the business still operating?

No, there are no employees left but I still maintain the workspace until we find a buyer for the operation

I am going to make really sure that my heirs are going to be left with a simple financial arrangement, thank you for the implicit reminder to do so. Your dad was awesome, I looked at that video 3 times and there is so much love poured into that workshop that it makes me wish I knew someone worthy of carrying that torch for another generation. I can identify just about every station and see how smart and cost efficient he had it all set up. Have you thought about reaching out to the Luthier guild?

https://luth.org/

Way cool! Also, La Crosse! I have family there. I’ll stop by one of these days.

New Yorker did a great interview with Parker in 2007. Even if you're not a guitarists, a good read about innovation: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/struts-and-fre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Parker_(guitar_maker)

I played the Parker Fly at Fishman Transducers before it came out, when I was a kid.

I was actually working there, not for Ken but for Larry Fishman. I should never have been: I was too young and inexperienced and had no idea the responsibility I was taking on, or how underpaid I was for that responsibility. For a brief time I was shipping, receiving, inventory and stockroom. It near killed me and when they let me go I could only agree, I had no more to give and was totally burned out. I can still see the general manager, though I don't remember his name now.

I was trying to make guitars myself at the time, along very different lines, and when I played Ken Parker's new creation, I had enough sense to not recoil and show how much I just didn't click with it, but I still made Larry Fishman real mad and Ken alarmed and unhappy. Turns out Ken knew better than I did that there were people who'd understand what he'd invented: among them, Adrian Belew.

I ended up doing Ken-like stuff in my own field: I hope he learned that secret, that if you're doing anything really original you can only measure it by how intensely it affects people, both positively and negatively. I'd love to hear one of his archtops, and I have no idea whether I'd love or hate it, but I feel certain I'd immediately react in some way, and that's the highest compliment.

Shame, I just saw his gofundme a couple of days ago. I've owned and played thousands of guitars, that's pretty much how I earned money through college (I'd flip guitars basically). Parker guitars were really something, but definitely not for everyone - a Parker Fly Deluxe was by far the lightest guitar I ever owned and tried. Should've kept it, as they go for 3-4 grand these days on the used market.

Unrelated, but: if you are a fan of comics/graphic novels, Ken Parker by Berardi & Milazzo [1] is an awesome Western. It's a series of short stories bound by a coherent but loose continuity, following the eponymous character as he moves across late-1800 America.

Having started in the '1970s, it features topics of social justice and the fate of Native Americans to a literary level rarely found in comics, but it's particularly good in how it depicts realistic characters - often conflicted, incoherent, and of uncertain morality. Parker himself is hardly a saint, and definitely not a hero to start with.

As far as I know, it has only partially been translated to English from its native Italian, but even the smallest nuggets is worth experiencing IMHO. There is something about Italians doing Westerns (see also: Sergio Leone) that brings the genre to epic levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Parker_(comics)

Alan Ford is another Italian gem taking place in the states and touching upon social justice issues, though more of a cynical/dark comedy. One of the villains is SuperHic, a drunk who steals from the poor and gives to the rich

A true shame. Until recently guitarists were notoriously conservative regarding instrument design and I have an immense amount of respect for people like Ken that chose to push those boundaries. Challenging guitarists to play something more progressive than the usual 75-year-old designs was a big deal in the heyday of the grunge movement and emergence of the vintage gear market. Hats off to a true American original.

Sorry, what's the shame about? That he could not be saved, or that the funds could not be raised? Or perhaps something else,... who's to be ashamed, though?

It is indeed a great lost to (living) humanity to loose its great minds, but still his letter is an incredible example of conscious apprehension of live and its transience. And reading 'shame' several times in the comments here is at least very weird to me.

God bless this beautiful soul's transition into the great unknown.

"it's a shame" is a common English colloquialism that means "that's sad", or maybe "that saddens me". No actual shamefulness is usually implied by the phrase. Weird, but there it is.

I'm a bassist, and was aware that Parker made basses, one of them for the legendary electric bassist Steve Swallow.

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/what-happened-to-parker-gui...

Years ago, a friend introduced me to the world of boutique luthiery. It’s a fascinating art and for steel string acoustic guitars, it’s been undergoing a kind of renaissance throughout the past 20 years. I was lucky enough to play some very fine instruments; it’s incredible how good they sound.

My step-father was a very active bluegrass musician in North Carolina, and when he died I inherited all of his instruments. In particular, I have a unique banjo made by a local luthier (Bob Shue) specifically for my step-father. The banjo features a machined bronze tone ring that lends a very dark tone to the instrument, rounding out the typically nasal characteristic nicely. It weighs a ton, but features a lot of very beautiful hand-carved inlay and absolutely gorgeous mahogany and ebony. The artistry is undeniable.

I grew up teaching myself to play guitar using the Online Guitar Archive (olga.org I think it was, all user-submitted ASCII text files). I was one of the teenage brats in the guitar shop putting their grubby hands on everything when the Parker Fly was first released. It blew my little mind, I have a lot of memories playing grunge riffs in a corner of Reliable Music. RIP Mr. Parker, good show old chap.

I loved that note.

He had a great attitude, and I loved him “passing the torch,” in that manner.

Maybe the attention the post gets, will help his family to recoup some of their medical costs. Kinda sucks, that they need to do it, though.

Ken will be missed. A true innovator and so generous with his knowledge and experience. I wasn't following his personal affairs closely so was extremely bummed by the latest events but it was great to hear from himself he found a person he believed in enough to pass the torch to.

I've had one of his electrics briefly and it felt and played great. I didn't bond with the instrument due to specific personal preferences, but it was great to feel for myself this particular guitar was as good an instrument as Parker reputation makes you expect.

I have a P32 guitar which is probably forgotten by many. I played a neighbor’s fly, and it was so much better than my crappy guitar at the time that I decided I wanted a Parker. The P32 was all I could afford but it is extremely playable and overall a really great guitar, even though everyone thinks it looks weird.

So sad. One of the few people who really innovated in the guitar space. I was just watching YouTube videos last night of his incredible archtop.

I never owned one of his original Fly series guitars but I played many back in the 90s and owned a DragonFly for a few years (not his design, but incorporated elements).

Oh man, this is sad to hear.

Parker guitars is new to me. Saw some pics. They look absolutely gorgeous!!

As a profession, luthiery is quite niche. I feel it’s one of those professions, like all craftsmanship, that is timeless.

Looking at these pics makes me feel like I want to learn the art.

(Bassist here)

I play and build electric guitars. Interesting that I wasn't that familiar with his work. Maybe I'll take some elements from the Fly into my next build...

This hit hard, for some reason:

>> $127,419 USD raised of $450,000 goal · 788 donations

Go play lute with the angles, noble sir.

What a shame, Ken was one of the few true innovators in luthiery.

A death notice... with a link to a GoFundMe for a cancer treatment. Just another poignant reminder on the state of American healthcare.

Stronger correlation: How the USA treats its Artistic class.

Can be a revolutionary talent, participate in commerce, and not afford to bury yourself.

For real, top of his trade and he ends up needing to plea for money. Hopefully some successful artists who have played Parkers will be able to help out.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw the GoFundMe and felt such disdain for American's inability to provide for itself.

Brilliant designer and luthier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com