guild
The Guild Guitar Company is a USA-based guitar manufacturer founded in 1952 by Alfred Dronge, a guitarist and music-store owner,
and George Mann, an ex-executive with the Epiphone Guitar Company.
The first Guild workshop was located in Manhattan, New York, where Dronge (who soon took over full ownership) focused on
archtop jazz guitars, both electric and acoustic. Rapid expansion forced the company to move to much larger quarters, on Newark St.
in Hoboken, NJ in what is now the Newman Leather building. The advent of the folk music craze in the early '60s had shifted the
company into production of an important line of acoustic folk and blues guitars, including a dreadnought series (D-40, D-50 and,
later, D-55) that competed successfully with Martin's D-18 and D-28 models, and jumbo and Grand Concert "F" models that were
particularly popular with blues guitarists like Mississippi John Hurt and Dave Van Ronk.
Notable also was the Guild 12-string guitar, which used a Jumbo "F" body and dual truss rods in the neck to produce a workhorse
instrument with a deep, rich tone distinctive from the chimier twelve-strings put out by Martin. The company continued to expand,
and was sold to the Avnet Corporation, which moved production to Westerly, Rhode Island in 1966. As the folk scene quieted, a new
generation of folk-rockers took Guild guitars on stage; the most notable Guild performance of that era was the D-40 upon which
Richie Havens opened the Woodstock Festival in 1969.During the 1960s, Guild also moved aggressively into the electric guitar market,
successfully promoting the "Starfire" line of semi-solid guitars and basses; a number of early West-Coast psychedelic bands used
these instruments, notably Jefferson Airplane's bassist, Jack Casady. Attempts at solid-body electrics fell flat in competition
with Gibson and Fender; those instruments, eccentric in design, are now viewed as collector items.
The decline of the folk and acoustic market in the later 70's and 80's put severe economic pressure on the company, and instrument
specialists generally concede that quality suffered, as it did with Guild's other American competitors in the acoustic guitar market.
All Guild production was moved to a factory in Corona, California after Guild was purchased in 1995 by Fender. In 2004, FMIC acquired
the assets of Washington-based Tacoma Guitar Company and all American Guild acoustic production has since been moved to Tacoma,
Washington, while production of Guild electric guitars was discontinued. In 2005, Fender introduced the Chinese-built Guild GAD
series acoustic guitars. Most recently, Guild has moved into a newly acquired facility in New Hartford, CT in 2008, where
hand-production of the top-end Guilds has significantly reclaimed the reputation of the company.
For a short time, reissues of 1960's and 1970's Guild instruments were manufactured in Korea under the DeArmond brand name.
Models included the Starfire, Bluesbird and Pilot Bass Series. These instruments display the DeArmond inlay on the headstock while
the truss rod cover shows the Guild name and logo.
Guild reentered the solid-body fashion in the 1980s with a series of superstrat-style solid bodies including models such as the Flyer,
Aviator, Liberator and Detonator, the Tele-style T-200 and T-250 (endorsed by Roy Buchanan) and the Pilot Bass, available in fretted,
fretless, 4 and 5-string versions. These guitars were the first Guild instruments to bear slim pointed headstocks, sometimes called
"pointy droopy", "duck foot" and "cake knife" for their distinctive shape. Pilot basses were revived by DeArmond in the 1990's
(including a 6-string through-neck version with fancy exotic woods) and discontinued along with the DeArmond brand in the early
21st century.