2024
BGF I
OF GUITARISTS. BY GUITARISTS. FOR GUITARISTS.
Brooklyn Guitar Feast III
Our annual invitation-only event for getting important guitars out of the vaults and into the hands of players.
2025
BGF II
Our Process
- 1
Try
Check out 50+ guitars, play them, discover your favorites.
- 2
Rank Five
Submit the five instruments you would most want to live with for the year.
- 3
Match
The allocation runs without status, reputation, or room politics attached.
- 4
Handoff
Matched players confirm loan details and take responsibility for the instrument.
- 5
Enjoy and Repeat
The guitar finds a great home for a year, gets played, then returned in time for the next BGF, when we do it all again.
Guitars at BGF III
Schedule
Pre-event Setup
If you want to volunteer to help with tasks like arranging the guitars in order, tuning them, moving around chairs, testing the PA, etc., we'd be grateful. Besides helping make the event more successful, you'll get extra time with the instruments.
Play
Doors open. Check out all the instruments, catch up with friends old and new, eat some lunch, and grab a 15 minute slot to make a YouTube or Instagram video with one of the guitars. David Blake will be the engineer at the recording studio set up downstairs, which will be open the length of the event. Sign up for slots on your invitation. Have fun. Many people attend not for borrowing a guitar, but just for the hang.
Rank and Submit
Vote for your 5 favorite guitars in order. Our unbiased algorithm looks to find the best matches, optimizing for group happiness.
Party / Jam / Enjoy
Guitars are awarded, as are the door prizes, including lessons with Pete Bernstein, Adam Levy, or Grant Gordy. Then the playing begins. For the brave: play on stage, with duet combinations assigned randomly every 10 minutes.
Loan Handoff
Photos of you with your new vintage guitar, sign a receipt for our insurance company, painless, we promise, and goodbyes.
FAQs
Ask a QuestionNo, it is by invitation-only, for obvious security reasons.
Invited guitarists, composers, improvisers, recording artists, educators, builders, collectors, writers, and serious listeners connected to the Foundation's circle.
Players rank five. The allocation randomizes identities, works through ranked choices, and keeps the match process separate from status in the room.
However you like them! We are not going to give game theory advice, but if two of your favorites are close, you might prefer to rank higher the one you think will be less popular. Someone has to win that fabulous guitar, but the algorithm fills as many first choices as possible within the group, then second choices, etc. Some unlucky folks have gotten shut out, so if you're risk averse, you may want to give higher weight to something that you would be very happy to have at the expense of a lower chance on a classic and popular guitar.
Most loans are intended to run one year, returning at the next Feast. Confirm any exceptions with the Foundation.
The Foundation handles insurance and approved repairs. Borrowers provide required contact details and communicate early if anything changes.
The final agreement will be linked here before handoff. For now, use this link if you need the current draft or have questions about the loan terms.
Request the loan agreementPLEASE! Every year we give a golden ticket to someone who has posted the best content tagging @theblueguitars and #ArchtopFoundation on social media. Congrats 2026 winner Ohad Niceberg, who has chosen to keep the 1958 Gibson Byrdland another year! Posting helps us publicize the Archtop Foundation and attract more guitars for next year's event.
Contact us here, and we'll take it back and relend it. If we have something in-house you'd like, perhaps we can swap it for something you'd prefer. We just want these guitars to get played, not take up room in your closet.
Contact the Foundation
About Us
The Archtop Foundation is a not-for-profit entity formed to acquire the Chinery Blue Guitar Collection, one of the premier archtop collections in the world. The guitars, which had been displayed in the Smithsonian Museum and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had languished unseen and unplayed for the past 20 years after the death of Scott Chinery.
The inspiration and desire to bring these instruments out of the vault and back into circulation expanded from just the Blue Guitars to other guitars held in the collections of friends of the Foundation. We exhibit the Blue Guitars at guitar shows, concerts, and museum exhibits, as well as lend them to artists for recording purposes.
The Brooklyn Guitar Feast builds on that idea, not only including acoustic archtops, but any fine instrument, acoustic or electric.
You can find us at @theblueguitars on Instagram and YouTube.
We support a variety of artistic and educational projects. Feel free to tell us how we may be able to help you with your project.
