The Loudest Thing in the Room
When I moved back to Nashville in the spring of 2024, it wasn’t long before I started playing with Matt Combs, and pretty soon after that I found myself doing recordings and live shows with players like Dennis Crouch, David Long, Brittany and Natalie Haas, and a whole lot of other people whose instruments were each taking up different parts of the mid-range I didn’t yet know I was losing. I was trying to make sure my guitar playing was what I wanted it to be, so I started recording our rehearsals and jam sessions. I’d lay my iPhone on a table and record with the voice recorder app, then listen to it when I got home. My guitar would be the loudest thing in the room when we played. Not because I wanted it to be loud. You could just hear it very well. But you couldn’t hear it at all on the recordings.
I thought, well, this phone is just no good for recording this guitar. So I researched online and bought a Sony recorder from Reverb. That’s supposed to be a really high-quality recorder, and it is. Recorded again at some rehearsal or jam, and again the guitar wasn’t there. More research, and a Tascam recorder this time, and I thought, man, I am going to get this figured out.
We went to a party, me and Matt, Dennis Crouch, Ed Driscoll, and a whole bunch of other people. I had the Sony going, I had the Tascam going, I had two iPhones that belonged to me, both my children’s iPhones, and my wife’s iPhone, surrounding every angle, some of them pointing directly at my guitar. I came home and lined up every one of those audio sources in Pro Tools, and I still couldn’t hear that guitar. At that point I understood that, despite how the guitar sounded in the room, and despite how it sounded to me, it wasn’t working.
The guitar is a 1969 Martin D-21. I bought it years ago in Japan while traveling there with the Tipton Hill Boys, George Buckner and Kevin Sluder. George and Toshio were in one of the guest bedrooms, and Toshio had taken a guitar out of a closet and set it down on a bed, and George called for me to come in. I’m just not the type of person that wants to play other people’s guitars. I’ll do it to be polite, but I don’t care about it. I also wasn’t in the market for a new guitar. I walked up to the guitar, didn’t take it out of the case, just reached down and played the D and the G string together with my bare thumb. The moment I did that, with no prior intention of buying any instrument, I looked up to Toshio and asked him how much. He gave me a price. I called my wife, asleep back in the states, and told her I didn’t know how, but I needed $4,000 immediately. A few minutes later I owned that guitar.
I used it on Willie Nelson’s Country Music album, and to cut the John Hartford Stringband Memories of John album, and every album I did after. It’s got a beautiful mid-range bloom at the bottom that feels comfortable and sounds very even, which is what I look for in any guitar. It’s also very powerful. Yet it couldn’t be heard on a live recording with a band, despite being the potentially loudest instrument there.
One day I was talking to Cameron Knowler, and he told me what the problem was. The mid-range is getting covered up by the other instruments. The bass has taken parts of it, the fiddle has taken parts of it, the mandolin has taken parts of it. Then he told me that other guitars, specifically Gibson guitars, cut through, and they were made for this ensemble type of playing.
So I decided I needed to get an archtop guitar. Then I told David Long, the mandolin player I used to work with and still do from time to time, and he said I should talk to Steve Gilchrist. I told him that every time I’d asked Steve to make me a guitar, he had refused. He told me that’s because I wanted a flat top and that Steve makes archtops. I had no idea Steve Gilchrist made archtop guitars. I guess maybe I should have, but like I said, I don’t play other people’s guitars, and I don’t really shop for guitars, so the amount of stuff I don’t know about guitars is amazing.
Steve Gilchrist is best known for his mandolins, which are about as good as mandolins get. When I asked him how he thinks about building an archtop guitar, his answer surprised me. He doesn’t really think of them as guitars at all. He builds them the same way he builds a mandolin, a mandola, a mandocello. The guitar is just the next size down the line, the next member of that family. Take a mandolin, he said, and take away everything that isn’t a mandolin, and a fiddle is what you’re left with. They are all the same instrument, carved and arched, sized up and down.
That reframed the whole problem for me. The flat top isn’t a scaled version of anything else in a bluegrass band. The archtop is.
To see how I would respond to one of his instruments, Steve knew of one down at Carter Vintage in Nashville. Serial number 806, a Gilchrist 16-inch junior, no cutaway, no inlay other than dots in the neck and the Gilchrist logo on a black peghead with ebony Waverly tuners. That’s right up my alley. I like real simple things. I went there with David Long and we played for a while and Charlie Flannery filmed us. I sent the videos to Steve, thinking we would talk about how this mapped onto the new guitar I wanted to commission him to build. His response was that I should consider going down there and buying that guitar. That was shocking to me, because this was a guitar he’d sold in 2021, so this wasn’t him making money. He just heard that the instrument fit, and I trust his judgment completely. Nobody parts with a Gilchrist instrument easily. And I’m not a rich man. But I ended up with the guitar, thanks to the help of some very good friends.
When I first got the Gilchrist, I talked about it a lot, because I was used to playing the Martin D-21. The Gilchrist doesn’t have that bloom. It’s got a more dry, piercing, cutting sound. In the beginning I came up with the phrase that it’s like chasing cake with orange juice. I’d play the Martin, and it was just like, wow, this sounds so amazing. And I’d pick up the Gilchrist, and it was clearly a healthier instrument to play, but it didn’t have that sweetness. But the more you play it, the more you realize the tonal quality is extremely complex, and the palette to choose from is there. It’s just a matter of knowing what you’re trying to select.
I also used flat wound strings on the instrument for the first several months I had it. It was so powerful and so foreign to me that I needed the time to allow my hands to adjust to it. At some point, I heard it on a recording and the flat wounds had started sounding like rubber bands, so they were swapped back out for medium gauge phosphor bronze strings.
I hear people say that tone comes from the instrument, and this whole article is a testament to my personal belief in that. However, on a deeper level, what an instrument can do largely depends on what a musician is able to hear and how willing they are to allow their hands to arrive at that sound. Matt Combs once told me that everyone’s instrumental tone sounds like their voice. I’ve found that to be accurate.
806, as I now call my guitar, is the only instrument I care to play these days. When I record anything, despite how light I might touch the instrument, it ends up in the recording. And I don’t miss that mid-range, because all the other instruments were already supplying it.
Steve had an explanation for that, and it wasn’t a coincidence. F-hole instruments, he told me, were the instruments of choice for big bands from the time they were invented, because they had to be heard. They project. The whole development of the violin, he said, was about projection, about being heard at the back of larger and larger rooms. As bands got bigger, the guitar became part of that rhythm section for the same reason. He put it plainly: you don’t ever see a classical ensemble with a flat top cello.
After getting 806, I saw a picture of Lester Flatt holding a Gibson L-5. I’m sure I’d seen it before and either ignored it or figured he couldn’t do better (no kidding, I would have absolutely thought that). But that day, it caused me to wonder what would have happened if he’d never switched to a flat top. I started talking to David Long and Steve and others about this idea.
Steve told me what he understood about how bluegrass got its instruments. When Bill Monroe was assembling the Bluegrass Boys, he experimented, and he settled on the five-piece ensemble, the bass, guitar, banjo, mandolin, and fiddle, for its blend, its separation, and its balance. But the guitar in that group was never a lead instrument. It was rhythm. Steve described the first live bluegrass band he ever saw in the States: when the guitar player stepped up to take a break, he had to get right up on the microphone, and the whole band had to pull back to let him through. Everybody in the band knew it, and everybody allowed for it, and they did it because they loved the sound.
When I played 806 next to David Long’s mandolin, they fit like two pieces of a puzzle. Steve has a way of describing why. An archtop has its own little frequency range, so you get less overlap, fewer places where two instruments are producing the same frequency, fewer points where they collide. What you get instead is separation and clarity across the whole range of the band. The fiddle, the bass, the mandolin, a cello, my guitar, all archtop, all carved, and they sit where they’re supposed to sit.
So I asked Steve why Monroe went with a flat top at all. He didn’t know for certain. His guess was warmth. The guitar and the bass together provided a warm foundation under everything else that cut. It was always just rhythm, so warmth was the job.
The flat top, the way I see it now, is a beautiful instrument that is the foundation of a typical bluegrass band. I love my D-21. But it tries to live in everybody’s space. The archtop isn’t playing that game. It’s built to stay in its lane.
I still wonder what it would sound like if the original Bluegrass Boys with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs had Lester using that archtop. Because that choice had an impact that defined much more than bluegrass.
Chris Sharp is a Grammy-winning rhythm guitarist (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) whose playing credits include Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, and John Hartford’s Stringband. He is also a Grammy-nominated producer. He co-founded The Nashville Collective with Matt Combs and is writing a memoir called Embracing the Paradox.