Ken Parker & Fred Kopo — 2x4

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THE KEN PARKER COLLECTION

Presented by Craig Snyder, CR Guitars

I first met Ken Parker in the late 1970s, on 48th Street in New York City, back when that stretch of Midtown was still the beating heart of the guitar world. I picked up one of his archtops in the shop there and immediately knew I was holding something different. Not different in the way that gets said about every guitar that comes along, but genuinely, architecturally different — as if the person who built it had asked questions nobody else had thought to ask.

Ken had that quality in everything he did. He was fearless in the best possible way: self-assured enough to throw out convention and curious enough to never stop asking what a guitar could be. At every guitar show I attended, he drew a crowd. Players, builders, collectors — everyone wanted to be in that conversation with him. He was as warm and disarming as he was brilliant, and that combination is rare.

Over the decades that followed, our friendship deepened. I watched him push the Parker Fly into production, watched him rethink the electric guitar from the ground up, and later watched him turn his attention to archtops with the same restless intelligence. He never stopped. That was Ken.

I am honored — and honestly a little humbled — to have been entrusted with finding homes for a collection of guitars from Ken's personal workshop. These are not production instruments. They are the experiments, the collaborations, the explorations that mattered most to him. Each one is a window into how his mind worked.

Sam Krimmel worked alongside Ken for years and knows these instruments better than anyone. He has prepared detailed notes on each guitar, and his words are part of every listing here. I'll add my own thoughts where I can, but Sam is the authority on what Ken built and why.

These guitars deserve players and collectors who understand what they're holding. I hope that's you.

— Craig Snyder, CR Guitars

CRAIG'S POV

(Prepared in collaboration with Sam Krimmel)

Ken didn't build the 2x4 to sell. He built it to find out. That distinction matters, and it's part of why these instruments are so remarkable.

The collaboration with Fred Kopo adds another layer to this particular guitar's story. Fred is a French luthier based in Brittany who founded his workshop in Rennes in 1988 and has long been recognized internationally as both a builder and an innovator. He first crossed paths with Ken at NAMM in 2001, and their friendship deepened over the years. In the spring of 2009, Fred traveled to Ken's shop in Gloucester and spent roughly eight weeks working alongside him. That residency is where this guitar was born. Two master builders, one bench, eight weeks of shared thinking. That's not a footnote. That's the story.

Sam Krimmel spent years at Ken's side and carries that knowledge forward better than anyone. Here is Sam's account of this particular guitar and the thinking behind it.

IN SAM'S WORDS:
"During his years running Parker Guitars, Ken used surplus parts, Fly bodies, and NiteFly necks to experiment with new ways of constructing a guitar. His so-called "2x4" guitars were his version of a semi-hollow — and the exact number he built is unknown, but it was somewhere around a dozen. Each was a one-off with unique construction and materials, though they shared a common architecture: two individual "plates," each made up of four pieces, connected by a central piece of wood. That central piece was either a thru-neck made by sawing off the sides of a Fly guitar, or a piece of wood with a NiteFly neck attached to it. The key is what this design leaves behind — the edges of each plate free to resonate, making the 2x4s remarkably responsive and sensitive instruments.

"This particular 2x4 was built in 2009 in Ken's shop in Gloucester, in collaboration with Fred Kopo. It features a Spanish Fly classical bridge with an abalone inlay and a Fishman under-saddle piezo paired with an early version of Fishman's onboard Aura preamp system — a clever combination that provides different voices for the pickup along with volume and tone control. Like everything Ken built during this period, it's a window into a forward-thinking mind that never stopped reimagining what a guitar could be."

BACK TO CRAIG
A dozen or so 2x4s were built. Each one different. This is one of them, and it came directly from Ken's collection. That's the provenance. I don't need to say more than that.

If you'd like to find out more about this item, just call or e-mail me. It would be my pleasure to talk to you about it.

Condition	excellent
Top & back	cedar plates
Sides	multi-laminate mahogany
Construction	two-plate semi-hollow body
Neck	Parker Nite Fly
Bridge	Parker Spanish Fly classical with abalone inlay
Pickup	Fishman under-saddle piezo
Preamp	Fishman Aura onboard
Controls	volume and tone
Tuners	Sperzel locking
Scale	25.5"