Guild Guitar Company - Pre-Fender Era

Pre-Fender Era

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, New Jersey, in what is now known as the R. Neumann Leathers 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 on the D-40 that Richie Havens played when he opened the Woodstock Festival in 1969.

During the 1960s, Guild moved aggressively into the electric guitar market, successfully promoting the Starfire line of semi-acoustic (Starfire I, II & III) and semi-solid (Starfire IV, V & VI) guitars and basses. A number of early West-Coast psychedelic bands used these instruments, notably guitarists Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, as well as Jefferson Airplane's bassist Jack Casady. Alembic started their transition from sound and recording work to instrument building by modifying Lesh & Casady's Starfire basses. The rare S-200 Thunderbird solid body electric was used by Muddy Waters and The Lovin' Spoonful's Zal Yanovsky.

The decline of the folk and acoustic market in the later '70s and early '80s put severe economic pressure on the company, and while instrument specialists generally concede that quality suffered at other American competitors, Guild models from the '70s and '80s are considered still made to the high-quality standards the Westerly plant was known for. Guild is also known to have successfully produced and marketed the first dreadnought acoustic which incorporates a "cut-away" in the lower shoulder of the instrument, known as the D40-C. During 1972, guitarist/designer Richard "Rick" Excellente, while working under Guild's new president Leon Tell in Guild's Elizabeth, New Jersey plant, conceptualized and initiated the idea for the first production acoustic dreadnought guitar featuring a "cut-away" design. The cut-away feature (which was commonly found on electric guitars), enabled the player to have a more usable higher fret range. Since the Guild D-40C, dreadnought guitars with a cutaway began to be produced by other guitar manufactures. Guild continues to manufacture the D-40C, and since its inception in 1972, now virtually every acoustic guitar company in the world incorporates this cut-away feature on their acoustic dreadnought guitars.

In the 1980s, Guild introduced a series of Superstrat 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, and 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.