Guitar has lost one of its great innovators as Ken Parker has died, aged 73. Parker was the luthier who designed the Parker Fly, an electric guitar that was truly ahead of its time – and still is – and brought a similarly fearless design sensibility to his archtop guitars.
Parker passed away peacefully at home in Gloucester, Massachusetts on October 5, following a battle with cancer.
In a statement dated October 3rd, posted to Ken Parker Archtops, Parker thanked his fans for their support and vowed that the company would continue through Sam Krimmel.
“My time here is about to close down and I won’t be part of the show anymore. What I have done with all my heart and soul is to put together a situation where my work can continue unabated and begin to bring some serious fruit to the things that I’ve been working on for the last 50 years,” he wrote. “My deepest and most heartfelt thanks to all of you. It’s been the experience of my lifetime being able to share my life’s work and knowledge with each of you through my instruments and via Archtoppery, and see that you get it.
“My hope is that you all build on what I’ve learned and shared, and take everything to the next level.”
Parker was born on August 25, 1952, and through his parents he inherited not only a love of music, but the idea that you could fix things up or make something new out of whole cloth.
“In my home, everybody seemed to be able to make everything that we needed,” he said in a 2024 YouTube feature with D’Addario. “My dad was pretty good with a saw and a hand plane, and my mom was a pretty good dressmaker, and I would say that my mother, Grace, was responsible for my first understanding of how a project takes place and how it moves ahead.”
The D’Addario interview is gold. Parker’s excitement at seeing a fine piece of tone wood is infectious.
I was one of those kids who took everything apart and put it back together
His workshop offers many insights into his thinking, and he readily gives up some of his techniques, paying homage to Orville Gibson as a pioneer for archtop design. A hand-written note in Parker’s workshop bears a Picasso quote that reads, “Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.” Words Parker lived by.
Inspiration soon came knocking. With a family who liked to make do and mend, it was only a matter of time before Parker followed suit. He was only 13 when he tried to make his first guitar.
“I was one of those kids who took everything apart and put it back together,” he said. “The first guitar-esque project was I made a guitar out of wood and corrugated cardboard, which didn’t work, because I didn’t know enough about corrugated cardboard at the time. But now I think I could take that same bunch of materials and make an instrument. I was pretty bummed out that it wouldn’t hold strings.”
Things took off for Parker once he moved to Rochester, New York, and started working with the furniture maker Richard Newman, whose expertise and influence accelerated his mastery with a piece of wood.
He built his first archtop then. Moving to New York, Parker was engaged in the business of repairing archtops, and once you put enough of them back together, it’s not long before you know how to make them yourself. Moving back to Connecticut, Parker started making various stringed instruments – most notably a five-string bass guitar for Steve Swallow.
Parker was now long way from his early improvisations with corrugated cardboard. Great minds think alike. He and Larry Fishman, now president and founder of the pickup superpower Fishman, got together. Parker Guitars was founded in 1990. The guitar that Parker made his name from did not comprise corrugated cardboard but it was just as radical a proposition, the Parker Fly.
Launched in 1993, the Fly had a wooden body with a carbon fibre and epoxy exoskeleton, a double-cutaway shape that still feels cutting-edge with its minimalist six-in-line headstock and trademark horns. The Fishman collaboration makes total sense once you consider the electronics on a Fly. This allowed players to mix magnetic and piezo tones.
The Parker Fly was something else. Its build made it super lightweight. The Fishman electronics made it super versatile. Its futuristic profile made it an acquired taste, but one that players such as Adrian Belew, Eddie Van Halen, Reeve Gabrels, Matt Bellamy, and, perhaps most famously, Joni Mitchell all acquired. The late David Lynch was also a fan of them, and Steve Vai [below] had a good time whenever he played one.
It is crazy to think that the Parker Fly Concert that Mitchell played was reportedly factory seconds, fished out of pile at the brand’s Massachusetts HQ. Parker fixed it up, modded it with a Roland Hexaphonic electric guitar pickup system so that Mitchell could pare it with a VG-8 processor for virtual alternate tunings, and Mitchell liked it plenty.
Speaking to Tony Bacon for Reverb, Parker said she wanted a lightweight guitar and got one – thought Mitchell wasn’t entirely sure where Parker got it from.
“She said, ‘Looks like you found it on a beach. But then it also looks like it came from outer space,’” recalled Parker. “I always liked the idea that it looked like a bleached bone, or driftwood, I guess. And that guitar just worked like a magic wand for her. She performed exclusively with my guitar for six years, and that makes me very proud.”
The Parker Fly evolved over the years, becoming more accessibly priced with the Nitefly bolt-on. Mitchell’s was case in point; the Concert was a piezo-only model. The Spanish Fly was a nylon-string guitar. And the composite/wood hybrid build would successfully translate to bass guitar, too.
In 2004, Parker returned to his first love, archtops, releasing his first, Olive Branch, in 2006. No one could fail to see the designer’s hand in these new builds. And he would share the process on his Archtoppery YouTube channel, which remains a hive of insight into how Parker’s mind works, and how a well-made guitar works.
Now it is in the hands of Krimmel. But Parker vows to help in whatever we he can: “Sam is a natural co-conspirator and he and I will be will be working together down the road through some sort of psychic medium. We’ve already got some amazing new things underway and soon we’re going to show you what that is all about.”
The Friends of Ken Parker have launched a GoFundMe to support his family with medical costs.
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