[Steve DeRosa]

Originally Posted by hotroad

Just picked up a Peerless Monarch today in sunburst. Great guitar. So now the questions about picks, capos and tunings.
1. I read that you are supposed to use a thick pick for archtops. Is that the norm.
2. Will my capos for my flat top guitars work on this one though the strings will be a bit heavier, 13's.
3. Does anyone use drop D or open tunings on an archtop?

1. Not necessarily - I've been using Dunlop Nylon .60/.67 (the rare orange ones)/.73 picks for the last 30+years, on a variety of instruments, and had no problem with either volume or tone
2. Traditionally, archtop players don't use capos - since they're predominantly jazz instruments we're used to playing in flat keys (try asking a trumpet or sax player to transpose to "guitar-friendly" concert E on the spot - and get ready to duck ); since you've never owned an archtop before, there's also a whole different technique involved in getting the best out of it - what the old Big Band players called "coaxing the velvet out" - and you're not going to get it by just grabbing a heavy pick and whacking away. Start by working on movable chord/scale formations - there's a distinct and characteristic difference in tone that you're not going to get with a capo - and adopt more of an orchestral string players' technique: "stroke" rather than "strum," "glide" rather than "pick," and let the guitar do all the work when it comes to volume/tone
3. Some players will occasionally use drop D, but that's largely vanished from the scene as players who need the extra low range have adopted 7-string instruments, with either a low B or low A; '30s soloist Carl Kress (a converted tenor banjo player) was known to tune his guitar in fifths - which gave him a low Bb on the 6th string - but other than that virtually every player I'm familiar with uses standard tuning