The Vals Quartzite Flattop represents one of the most extraordinary collaborations between nature and musical craft. When Pius Truffer, owner of the world-renowned Truffer Natural Stone Quarry in Vals, Switzerland, approached luthiers Claudio and Claudia Pagelli with a vision to create a guitar from his own Vals Quartzite stone, they recognised immediately that the task demanded innovation beyond convention.
The initial concept centred on an electric guitar, yet Truffer’s passion pointed elsewhere. He wanted to hear the voice of the stone itself. That simple desire transformed the challenge into something unprecedented. An acoustic instrument it would be.
Building an entire guitar from stone proved impractical. The weight alone would render it unplayable, suffocating rather than amplifying sound. Instead, the Pagellis combined a Vals Quartzite top with ziricote wood for the back and sides. The stone began as a boulder weighing several tonnes. Cutting and sanding reduced it to a thickness of precisely one millimetre. Hours of meticulous work transformed raw material into something both fragile and impossibly strong.
Stone presents fundamental problems when used for a guitar top. Its rigidity resists the forces that a traditional flattop soundboard must endure. The twisting tension applied by vibrating strings pushes conventional construction to its limits. Stone simply cannot flex in the ways wood does. The Pagellis responded by abandoning tradition entirely.
They created what becomes their first flattop guitar employing an archtop’s string path. Rather than a bridge that rests upon the top, they designed a floating bridge. The strings do not anchor directly to the stone top. Instead, they thread through small holes cut carefully into the surface, then attach to a removable panel situated at the end-block inside the body. This configuration generates the necessary string angle and pressure without forcing the stone to bear weight it cannot reasonably support.
The Soundhole
The soundhole itself departs from standard design. Rather than a circular opening in the centre of the top that would weaken the stone’s structural integrity, the Pagellis integrated the soundhole into the guitar’s architectural form. This allows the entire stone surface to vibrate freely, uninterrupted and undamaged.
The final instrument stands as something genuinely singular. The Vals Quartzite Flattop does not sound like a conventional guitar. Its voice carries the acoustic properties of stone, a material that spent millions of years forming within the earth before Marco Mainetti, the stone craftsman, released it into musical life. The collaboration between Pagellis and Mainetti transformed possibility into reality.
The guitar now exists not as a curiosity but as testimony to what emerges when makers refuse to accept the limits others have established. Truffer obtained precisely what he sought. He listens to his stone every time the guitar is played, its unique voice speaking of geology, craft, and the courage required to create what no one has created before.
