The Selmer guitar — often called a Selmer-Maccaferri or just Maccaferri by English speakers, as early British advertising stressed the designer rather than manufacturer — is an unusual acoustic guitar best known as the favored instrument of Django Reinhardt. Selmer, a French manufacturer, produced the instrument from 1932 to about 1952.
History
In 1932 Selmer partnered with the Italian guitarist and luthier Mario Maccaferri to produce a line of acoustic guitars based on Maccaferri's unorthodox design. Although Maccaferri's association with Selmer ended in 1934, the company continued to make several models of this guitar until 1952. The guitar was closely associated with jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
Construction
In its archetypal steel-string Jazz/Orchestre form, the Selmer is distinguished by a fairly large body with squarish bouts, either a "D"-shaped or longitudinal oval sound hole, and a cutaway in the upper right bout. The strings pass over a movable bridge and are gathered at the tail, as on a mandolin. Two "moustache" markers are fixed to the soundboard to help position the movable bridge. The top of the guitar is gently arched or domed — a feature achieved by bending a flat piece of wood rather than by the violin-style carving used in archtop guitars. The top is also rather thin, at about . It has a comparatively wide fretboard (about at the nut) and a snake-shaped, slotted headstock. The back and top are both ladder-braced, which was the norm for French and Italian steel-string guitars of the time (unlike American guitars, which frequently employed X-braced tops by this period).
Other models can be more conventional in appearance and construction, with the Modèle Classique, for example, essentially being a standard fan-braced, flat-top classical guitar.
Early days: "Maccaferri" or D-hole guitar
Early models have a large, D-shaped sound hole (the "grande bouche", or "big mouth"), which was shaped specifically to accommodate an internal resonator invented by luthier Mario Maccaferri — this was designed to increase the volume of the guitar and to even out variations in volume and tone between different strings. The scale, at 640 mm, and fretting of the early guitars was very similar to other contemporary guitars (including the Gibson and Martin guitar designs from which most modern acoustic guitar patterns ultimately derive), but with a wide fretboard more typical of a classical guitar; they also had 12 frets clear of the body, although left hand higher fret access was facilitated by a (then novel) cutaway in the upper right bout. These guitars were made in several versions, including gut string (classical), steel string, seven string (Hawaiian) and four string ("Grand" and "Ténor") versions, plus a special four string "Eddie Freeman" model (see below). Many of these guitars, produced during 1932 and 1933, were sold to the UK market via Selmer's London showroom (which also distributed the guitar to regional dealers) and it was during this period that the guitars became known as "Maccaferris" to Britons.
Post-Maccaferri or Oval-Hole guitar
Maccaferri designed the original guitars and oversaw their manufacture, but his involvement with Selmer ended after 18 months. Over the next few years, the design evolved without his input (including some transitional models with round soundholes). By 1936, the definitive version of the Selmer guitar had appeared, with an oval hole in place of the large D-shaped hole, no internal resonator, and a neck with 14 frets clear of the body in place of the original 12. It was officially called the "Modèle Jazz", but also known as the "Petite Bouche" (small mouth) or "Oval Hole". These later guitars also have revised internal bracing and a longer scale length of . The vast bulk of guitars produced after the Maccaferri period were sold in Selmer's native France; these later guitars are always referred to as "Selmers" (as are the earlier guitars by the French).
While Maccaferri may no longer have been around (and his resonator had been abandoned), the later guitars retain many unusual characteristics of his original innovative design, including the cutaway, the world's first sealed oil-bath machine heads and a top that is bent, mandolin-style, behind the floating bridge — something that contributes to the guitar's remarkable volume when played.