Ovation Guitar Company

The Ovation Guitar Company, a holding of Kaman Music Corporation, which itself is owned by Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, is a guitar manufacturing company based in New Hartford, Connecticut. Ovation primarily manufactures steel-string acoustic guitars. They have been credited with "by far the most significant developments in the design and construction of acoustic guitars" from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Ovation guitars have a history of innovative design, reflecting its founder's engineering training and development of Kaman helicopters. Ovation guitars have composite synthetic bowls; earlier acoustic guitars have had wooden sides abutting a flat back since the 1700s. Kaman diagnosed structural weaknesses in the orthogonal joining of the sides, and felt that a composite material could be used for a smooth designed body. Ovation's parabolic bowls dramatically reduced feed-back, allowing greater amplification of acoustic guitars. Improved synthetics used techniques from helicopter engineering to control vibrations in the bowl. Ovation has developed a thin neck, with the feel of an electric-guitar's neck, but with additional strength from layers of mahogany and maple reinforced by a steel rod in an aluminum channel. The composite materials and thin necks reduced the weight of Ovations.

For its tops (soundboards), Ovation used sitka spruce, a wood which Kaman engineers had been using in helicopter blades. In the 1970s, Ovation developed thinner sound-boards with carbon-based composites laminating a thin layer of birch, in its Adamas model, which has been viewed as one of the most radical designs in the history of acoustic guitars. The Adamas model dissipated the sound-hole of the traditional soundboard among 22 small sound-holes in the upper chamber of the guitar, yielding greater volume and further reducing feedback during amplification. The Adamas design strengthened the sound-board, reducing the traditional design's bracing and hence its weight. In the 1980s, another innovation was the introduction of shallow-bowl guitars, which appealed to electric guitarists.

Later, on-board electronics allowed guitarists to move about the stage, rather than stay immediately in front of a microphone. On-board electronic tuning, availability, uniformity, and frugal costs facilitated performances by guitar ensembles like Robert Fripp's Guitar Craft students. Ovation has also produced solid-body electric guitars and active basses.