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Michihiro Matsuda - “Does the California roll dream of NY pizza?” for the Blue guitar collection – in progress.

I like jazz. I first discovered its beauty during my college years in Tokyo, and it soon became my favorite music. Around the same time, I also discovered the beauty of archtop guitars. In Japan, where I grew up, acoustic archtop guitars were closely associated with jazz, and I was drawn to their clean, warm, yet complex tones. In those years, my tonal preference gradually shifted away from the distortion sounds I enjoyed playing in rock music during high school toward these more nuanced, expressive acoustic sounds.

I am honored and truly grateful that my guitar will become part of the Blue Guitar Collection. I’m very excited to take on this challenging project. The instrument will be an acoustic archtop guitar with a neck pickup.

My approach to building an archtop guitar is to explore how I can apply and adapt my experience in flat-top guitar making. Most of the guitars I build in my workshop are acoustic flat-tops, and that background forms the foundation of my craft.For example, in my flat-top approach, I mainly control stiffness through the bracing system under the soundboard. In contrast, with archtop guitars, stiffness is largely controlled by the degree of arching, with minimal bracing underneath. From my perspective, adding an arch is another way of introducing stiffness—just expressed through a different design language. I aim to use my strengths in flat-top construction and translate them into the archtop form.