electric guitars

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Electric_guitar

Phantom Guitarworks

Jack Charles, founded Phantom Guitarworks in the early 1990s in Clatskanie, Oregon to make versions of the Vox Phantom guitar, as well as the Vox Teardrop (Phantom III / Mark VI) and MandoGuitar. All are hand assembled in the United States of America with foreign and domestic parts, hand-wired with silver solder, and all of the pickups and hardware used are proprietary, to replicate the look and feel, of the original 1960's Vox instruments.

Source: Phantom Guitarworks website (2 February 2019)

Petillo

Phillip J. Petillo (1945 – 2010) was an inventive American luthier with a background in engineering.  He studied at Columbia University and while in New York Phillip he worked with Vincent "Jimmy" Diserio, godson of John D'Angelico in his Manhattan workshop.  From around 1966 onwards then on, he made, repaired and restored guitars and other instruments for top professional musicians, recording artists, local and national players, as well as designing products for the international music community.  In the 1970s he made prototypes for Travis Bean and Gary Kramer and helped to set up the Kramer factory. Petillo patented several musical inventions including a triangular fret, a pickup, a tailpiece and a drumstick design.

Source: Petillo Guitars website (30 January 2019)

Perron

Michael Perron trained in violin and cello repair at Bein And Fuschi Company in Chicago before joining Hamer as a master luthier in the 1980s. Now from his home workshop he produces one of a kind custom instruments specialising in electric guitars.

Pensa

Rudy Pensa opened "Rudy's Music Stop" on 48th Street in New York City in 1978. Rudy made the first "Pensa" electric guitar in 1982 - the R Custom and sold these from his shop. In 1985 Pensa began a collaboration with John Suhr to make Pensa-Suhr guitars until Suhr left to join Fender in 1990. During the Pensa-Suhr years, Rudy teamed up with Mark Knopfler to design the MK model - updated again in 2000 as the Pensa MK2.

Source: Pensa Custom website (18 December 2018)

Peavey

Peavey Electronics Corporation is an American company that makes musical instruments and audio equipment. It was founded in 1965 in  Meridian, Mississippi by Hartley Peavey, in the loft above his father's music store. He started out by making amplifiers by hand, at around 1 per week. By 1968 Peavey opened his first factory, and also diversified into PA equipment. The 1970s saw rapid growth and expansion of product lines for Peavey, in 1977 they introduced the first CNC made electric guitar: the Peavey T-60 model. By 1978 Peavey was the largest maker of electric guitars in the USA. In 1985 they opened a factory in the UK. In recent years Peavey has been moving more of its manufacturing overseas, closing the UK factory and the  A Street plant in Meridian, Mississippi in 2014 in favor of manufacturing in China.

Source: Peavey web page (15 June 2022)

Pear Custom Guitars

Pear Custom Guitars were made by Tom Palecki in Pleasanton, California from 1986 to 1995. Palecki was a product designer who began painting guitar bodies in his garage. He soon began developing his own designs - the first being the Voyager model. In 1991 he moved from his garage to open PEAR Custom Guitars and PEAR Design in a commercial building in Pleasanton, California.  He installed a professional paint spray booth and some machine tools to help in the building bodies and necks. There were other Pear Custom models: the Shark and the Voyager II as well as special custom models like a Skull guitar made for the Murder Bay guitarist. In 2007 Palecki moved to Arizona and set up a new workshop - Arizona Guitars.

Source: Arizona Guitars website (archived 2009)

Pawar

Pawar Guitars was founded by Jay Pawar around 1999. The main design was the Turn of the Century Series with a striking scroll on the upper horn. These USA made guitars all had Pawar's Positive Tone System - with push/pull tone and volume knobs coupled with a 5-way selector switch to give 20 different tonal possibilities. By 2010 Pawar Guitars had closed down.

Source: Pawar catalog 1999

PRS

Paul Reed Smith Guitars (PRS Guitars) was founded in 1985 in Annapolis, Maryland by Paul Reed Smith. Smith started building guitars while still in college and soon decided to make it his career. In the early days he was making around 1 guitar a month. He would hanging out at the local concert venues and talk his way backstage to to show his guitars to the touring musicians. He would occasionally make a sale this way: Carlos Santana, Al Di Meola, Howard Leese, and other well known players agreed to try out his guitars. After getting some success with orders for more than 50 guitars, he made two prototypes and took them on the road to demo to East Coast guitar dealers. This generated enough orders for him to start his company.

Parker

Parker Guitars began in 1993 as the vision of pioneering luthier, Ken Parker. The Parker Fly was their first production model and was designed by Ken Parker and Larry Fishman. The Fly was an innovative design - made from light weight woods reinforced by composite materials and with a dual pickup system mixing magnetic and piezo pickups. The two systems were blended by a stereo preamp that allowed you to mix the volumes and tones on-board. A "smart" switching jack sensed stereo or mono cable and routed the signals accordingly. A more conventional and affordable version of the Fly, called the NiteFly was also introduced with solid wood body and a bolt-on neck. These original Parker guitars were made in Wilmington, Massachusetts until 2003 when Ken Parker sold his company to the US Music Corporation and production was shifted elsewhere.

EGGLE (PATRICK JAMES)

Patrick James Eggle started guitar building at the age of 15 as part of a school project. This led onto a career as a guitar designer, repairer and builder. In the early ninties he supervised production at the Patrick Eggle guitars company in Conventry, but left in 1995 to work on small scale custom orders.

He relocated with his family to North Carolina and began to build up a distribution network for his high end archtop and acoustic instruments. With a dealer network established he is now back in the UK in Oswestry, and is scaling up production with a large new purpose built workshop in Oswestry where all design and production is now completed.

There are currently six acoustic models in production, ranging in price from £1999 to £2499 with lots of options for woods, inlays and bindings.

Ovation

From 1966 to 2007, Ovation guitars, and later on Adamas guitars, were a brand of Kaman Music Corporation, a subsidiary of the Kaman Corporation, a large aerospace company. Charles Kaman, the President and a guitar enthusiast, decided that his company could apply its technology to acoustic guitar making. In 1966 after 18 months of research and development a team of Kaman engineers perfected the rounded semi-parabolic composite body. They used a similar composite technology for these rounded backs as used for aircraft rotors and called it Lyrachord - it could be molded into shape without the need for traditional bracing.

OSCAR SCHMIDT

The Oscar Schmidt Company was founded in 1871 and incorporated in 1911. By the early 1900s, the company had five factories in Europe and a factory on Ferry Street in Jersey City. They made all kinds of stringed instruments, guitars, banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, zithers, and Autoharps. The company prospered through the early 1920s. Oscar Schmidt instruments were sold in many rural parts of the country where no music stores existed. Salesmen distributed the products far and wide, making them available in general, small town furniture and dry goods stores. Country guitar pickers and blues musicians living in areas of the South and in Appalachia, far from the city, frequently played Oscar Schmidt instruments because they were both inexpensive and available locally.

Today the Oscar Schmidt brand is part of U.S. Music Corporation which also owns Washburn Guitars, Parker Guitars, Randall Amplifiers, Jay Turser Guitars and Profile Accessories.

OLP

OLP (Officially Licensed Product) was a division of Elite Music Brands and HHI Music (Hanser Holdings International). The OLP website launched in 2002, displaying OLP guitars and basses which were licensed copies of Ernie Ball Music Man models. OLP also worked with other brands like Traben Bass Company, Orange County Choppers, McSwain Guitars and Coffin Cases to produce lower cost licensed copies of their products. OLP guitars and basses were made in China and had a good reputation for quality - typically using Korean hardware. OLP Guitars were sold exclusively through a network of authorized OLP Dealers. The OLP brand was retired by HHI in 2009 when Music Man launched the Sterling brand for its entry level models.

NS Design

NS Design is a company founded by renowned instrument designer Ned Steinberger in 1990. The company specializes in developing electric string instruments, with a primary focus on bowed instruments such as the violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Steinberger's vision is to explore the potential of these instruments beyond replicating acoustic sounds.

NOVAX

Ralph Novak (1933-2022) founded Novax Guitars in 1989 when he was awarded the US patent for his multi-scale fretboard (fanned-fret) design. Novak had been repairing and customizing guitars since the early 1970s, working in 48th Street in down-town Manhattan in LoBue/Guitar Lab, We Buy Guitars, and Alex Music, He moved to California in 1978, and began working in Subway Guitars in Berkeley before starting his own shop in Emeryville. This was when he had the idea for a multi-scale guitar and developed and patented the invention. He noticed that longer scale instrument had better tone on the bass strings, but shorter scale instruments had a warmer tone on the treble strings and this forms the basis of his multi-scale fanned-fret design.

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