09/07/2026
I was talking with someone about this guitar the other day, and it dawned on me that I’ve never really explained the thought process behind the design.
Archtop guitars are traditionally pretty rooted in the Art Deco movement, and most of the embellishment you see on them tends to land somewhere in that vein.
This particular guitar was made for a client in Mexico. He initially approached me about building a fairly traditional archtop, but almost immediately I started thinking about how I could incorporate something inspired by Mexican art and design into the instrument.
After getting a bunch of Day of the Dead skulls out of my system on paper—and realizing pretty quickly that direction was going to feel a little too obvious and corny—I started looking instead at traditional Mexican textiles, pottery, and decorative patterns.
That’s where the idea really started to come together: what would happen if I took some of those patterns and visual rhythms and tried to reinterpret them through the language of Art Deco?
The result was this guitar.
