There's an Island Instruments DelAir hanging in the shop right now, and I keep taking it down and exploring what it has to offer (which is quite a lot, I should add). It's such a unique instrument I wanted to take a deeper dive into what makes it such a remarkable guitar.
The long/short of it?
The DelAir is a hollowbody archtop. Three inches deep at the deepest point, torrefied Adirondack spruce over figured sapele, sunburst, ivoroid binding, Waverlys with ivory buttons. You'd be forgiven for thinking it might be on the heavier side from photos alone, but the reality is far different. Every single staff member who has picked it up does the same thing, which is that little involuntary lift, the one where your arms were braced for something heavier and now they don't know what to do with themselves.
It weighs all of 5lbs 3oz (!).
In this post I want to explore how that's possible, because the answer turned out to be way more interesting than I expected when I first encountered this guitar, and because it explains basically everything about how this guitar plays, responds, and sounds.
The Trade-Off
Here's the (simplified) thing about archtops: the voice comes from the air within the body and from a plate (top) that's free to move. More body depth, more air, and generally more warmth and more bloom. That's why the classic jazz boxes are the size they are.
But, you pay for those qualities in mass. A carved spruce top has to survive string tension, so the builder graduates it, taking wood off where it can be spared and leaving it where the load actually is. That's where most of a great archtop's character lives, and it's why carving a plate well is such a hard thing to do. It's also where you hit a wall - solid wood only gets so thin before it stops holding up.
Interestingly, Nic Delisle's (Island Instruments) way around that didn't come out of tried/true archtop building at all.
The Double Top
Nic worked on the DelAir for years with classical guitar luthier & shop mate, Mathieu Dallaire Walker. That collaboration is in some ways the whole story, because the central idea for this model comes straight out of the classical world.
The top and back on the DelAir aren't carved plates - they're laminations. Two very thin skins of wood with a layer of Nomex honeycomb bonded in between. Nomex is an aramid honeycomb used in aerospace panels, and it's almost entirely air by volume.
Pictured above: Nomax
If that sounds exotic, the principle underneath it is one you already know - it's an I-beam. A panel gets almost all of its stiffness from the material at its outer surfaces, and the stuff in the middle contributes basically nothing but weight. So you take two thin skins and separate them with something that holds them apart and weighs nothing. What you get is a plate way stiffer than a solid one of the same weight, or way lighter than a solid one of the same stiffness - pick your prize.
Classical builders have been doing this for years to get more sound out of less soundboard. Think about what a double-top classical is working with: nylon strings, fingertips, not a lot of energy going in (compared to a steel-string instrument), and it still fills a room. Now take that idea and point it at a steel-string archtop, where there's a whole lot more energy on tap. That's not an obvious move, but it's a really good one, and it's why the DelAir responds and sounds the way it does.
The Sides
With all of this talk of tops/plates, the rim is the part of this build I find more interesting, honestly.
On a normal archtop, the sides are made from thin bent wood and they aren't really structural on their own. Kerfed liners run along the inside edges to give the top and back something to glue to, and the blocks at the neck and tail carry the actual loads.
Nic laminates his rims the same way he laminates the plates. Full-height kerfed liners sandwiched between exterior skins, so the side itself becomes a stiff structural piece instead of a thin wall being held in shape by whatever's glued to it. His words for the whole system are "extremely stiff and stable", and having spent time with the guitar, that definitely tracks.
That matters more than it sounds like it should. A rim that flexes is eating energy that should be staying in the top. Take the flex out and more of what you put into the strings comes back at you.
The Shape
What you notice about the DelAir before almost anything else, is that it doesn't look like anything else.
The plates and sides are formed on five-foot radius hemispheres. What that means practically is that the depth isn't constant. It runs from a full three inches at the deepest point down to an inch and a quarter, and it's a continuous taper the whole way.
In photos this might come across as just a design flourish. In your lap, it's ergonomics, and it's the first thing you notice (and feel). The shallow end of the taper is exactly where the guitar meets your ribs and where your forearm comes over, and the deep end is where the air is doing the acoustic work. You get a deep-bodied instrument's volume without a deep-bodied instrument shoving your picking arm out and away from the strings. The neck floats clear of the body too, so the upper frets are actually there, not there in theory.
Playability
The DelAir responds to the absolute lightest touch. Meaning, with almost no input from your pick, you've got a full, rich, remarkably loud note. Everyone who plays it makes a face the first time, because they came in with a lifetime of expectations about how hard you have to hit an archtop guitar to get something good out of it, and the DelAir just doesn't need it. That's the stiffness and the low mass working together. There's less structure standing between you, your ideas, your expression - and the sound.
What you get out of that is enormous range under your right hand. Play light and it's warm and round. Dig in and it opens up, gets bright, gets cutting. And it does that smoothly across the whole distance between the two, not in jumps. All the tonal control you'd normally go looking for in a knob is sitting in your picking hand instead. If you've played an instrument that does this you know exactly what I mean, and you know how distracting it is to go back to one that doesn't.
Nic put a floating Mojo Hersheybucker on it instead of the gold foils you'll find on most of the Island roster, and I think it's the right call. A floating pickup sits above the top rather than in it, so nothing's been cut into the plate and nothing's weighing it down, and the pickup ends up reporting the guitar's own character instead of replacing it with its own. Plugged in, it still sounds like the DelAir. That's rarer than it should be with amplified archtops - nothing gets lost in that translation.
It should also be noted that the angle of the neck is adjustable for on-the-fly changes in string action, independent of the optimally set bridge & saddle height.
In Stock Now
The one currently in stock is serial number 5. Torrefied Adirondack spruce over figured sapele, grained ivoroid binding on body and neck, satin lacquer, sunburst. Sapele neck, ebony board, 12" radius, 25" scale, medium oval C at .87" to .89", Jescar EVO frets, bone nut. Island bridge, Waverly tuners with ivory buttons, Schatten 500k electronics with thumbwheel volume and tone. Calton case.
It's the second DelAir we've ever had - I wouldn't count on a lot more as these are difficult to make, and as such, rather rare.
If any of this got you curious, Nic walks through the construction himself on episode 81 of the Fretboard Journal's Luthier on Luthier podcast with Michael Bashkin, and it's a good hour. And if you want to know what a five-pound archtop feels like, I can't get you all the way there in writing. Come to Lexington and take it for a spin, or give us a call and we'll gladly walk you through it.