6/2/2023 0 Comments Electra guitars 1970s![]() All had the same hardware and electronics, but different shapes. There were a bunch of different radical designs introduced by SLM, including this Lady (obvious name!). Two: SLM entered into a joint venture with Matsumoku and began a year-long process of taking over Matsumoku’s own brand name Westone. One: SLM started playing with new pointy guitar designs. Other stuff happened, but this brings us up to the early 1980s and the craze for pointy guitars. Paul Yandell, who backed Chet Atkins, endorsed them. Those open-coil zebra pickups on Japanese Electras were American. ![]() From a certain point on, guitars came made by Matsumoku but without pickups, which were installed in the US. ![]() One advantage they had was that they hired a guitar designer named Tom Presley who started designing guitars and supervising the manufacture of the electronics in St. This coincided with the rise of the copy era, and it wasn’t long before Electra was competing with Ibanez for the “beginner” market and beyond. In around 1970 they introduced a “copy” of the Ampeg Dan Armstrong “See-Through” guitar called The Electra. ![]() But when Valco/Kay went under, options were running out. It was probably pretty tentative at first. Sometime in the late-’60s, SLM started to bring in guitars with the Electra brand. Like everyone else, SLM couldn’t resist the allure of Japan.
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