My guitar collection - Acoustics
It seems to be common that aspiring acoustic guitar builders always bite their teeth on an archtop. For Bill Collings that was no different. Although not often built and usually requiring a custom order, the AT-16, AT-16 Deluxe, AT-17, and AT-18 archtops did become part of the Collings line. Other variations, even more rarely seen, are the AT-00 or any of the above models with an oval soundhole instead of f-holes or s-holes. Some of them have a pickup, e.g. a Kent Armstrong Handwound Floating PAF, but many do not. It goes without saying only the highest quality tonewoods and materials are used for these rarities and each one receives a lot of attention. In general, construction of these archtops involved a lot of Bill’s personal effort, if not being build by him completely. Unsurprisingly given the model designation, the top and back grained ivoroid bound cutaway body is 17” wide, has a length of 20¼”, i.e. slightly shorter than the AT-16, and a depth of 3”, built out of a fully-carved premium Sitka spruce top with fully-hollow X-bracing and bound s-holes, bound ebony pickguard, ebony adjustable bridge, and fully-carved highly figured maple back and sides. The premium figured maple neck has an archtop C-shape profile and matching finish. The 14”-26” compound radius ebony fingerboard has grained ivoroid binding and modern double parallelogram inlays. With a 111⁄16“ wide bone nut, the scale length is 25½”. The bound deluxe flared haircut headstock has an ebony veneer on both font and back, an ebony truss rod cover, modern triple parallelogram inlay, and Schaller gold plated tuning machines w/tab, either with ebony or ivoroid buttons. The whole guitar has a gorgeous high-gloss nitrocellulose lacquer sunburst finish. With all this, the total length comes to 42”. Note that what has been described here is a typical appearance of an AT-17. Since every build is special, with many possible customizations and Bill’s personal involvement, many an AT-17 may (and will) differ from this. At the time of writing (Halloween 2025) Collings does not take any archtop orders. However, the AT-17 is still listed on their website:
Collings AT-17
The story behind this archtop
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I am not really a jazz player. So should my Tacoma AJF28CE archtop suffice? Or is my fandom of all things Bill Collings enough to go after a piece of art, just so happening to manifest itself in the form of an archtop? Questions, questions, questions, with no easy answers. Any Bill Collings built archtop does not come cheap. When writing this, a 2000 AT-17 had shown up in the Reverb marketplace at the end of October 2025 for just under $32k. Enticing, indeed. And it sold within a day or 2! A very early (1981) 7-string 18” archtop had been listed for sale in Japan for 10 months, setting you back $20k+. Although I am willing to believe its provenance, it is a bit of an odity. As faith would have it, another gorgeous 1990 AT-18 (Custom?) miraculously showed up on Reverb the day after Halloween 2025 for slightly south of $37k. (I expect that one to go fast too.) With the AT-16 in The Netherlands, a rare occurrence of all 3 archtops models appearing in the same marketplace! And Bill’s contribution to the Blue Guitar Collection, basically an AT-18 Custom, was for sale in 2021. But not by itself. It could only be acquired when purchasing all 22 archtops in the Blue Guitar Collection, as originally curated by Scott Chinery. That collection went to The Archtop Foundation for several millions. With Bill Collings no longer among the living, there are not going to be more archtops built by him. Which make any of his archtops rare by nature. But one can dream, right?
