Even by the time of early Electras, it was making surprisingly good guitars. There have been a lot of excellent Japanese manufacturers over the years, but Matsumoku is legendary for its quality and innovation. The earliest Electras are most interesting because many were made by the Matsumoku Motto factory of Matsumoto City. The following year, a slew of Japanese companies offered variants, including Aria, Ibanez, and SLM, with its The Electra guitar.Įlectra became the official brand name of SLM’s Japanese imports.
In ’69, Ampeg hired Dan Armstrong to design a novel new design and, in keeping with their penchant for alternative materials, the result was the See-Through guitar. “It’s a copy,” he thought, and relatively primitive copies of American designs followed shortly.Īrguably, the “copy era” kicked into gear in 1970. This story is apocryphal, but Shiro Arai of Aria guitars visited NAMM, which was the show where the Gibson Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” was reintroduced. Japanese manufacturers had begun “copying” its European competition by the mid ’60s. The demise of Valco/Kay ironically coincided with a low-point for imported guitars. Following the Greek pattern, there were a few, apparently unadvertised models named Electra. Circa ’66, SLM began importing a line of Japanese-made electric guitars named Apollo. With the onslaught of European and then Japanese imports in the ’60s, SLM began exploring its options.
Kay-made Custom Krafts were really pretty interesting and made until Valco/Kay went out of business in 1968, and, indeed, a few might have been made for a bit thereafter. SLM eventually developed its own brand, made by Kay, called Custom Kraft. Other instruments followed, including Magnatone amplifiers and a variety of guitars, including Kays. The company met with success and continued to grow. SLM was founded by a violinist named Bernard Kornblum in 1922 as an importer of European string instruments. Louis Music (SLM) is actually one of the oldest remaining music distributors left in the U.S., most of the venerable examples of this institution having disappeared by the ’70s. Let’s take this remarkable 1978 Electra MPC Standard X320 into evidence! If prices on eBay are any indicator, it’s clear that guitar aficionados have little appreciation about how good and innovative these guitars were.
One of the more successful Japanese-made guitar brands of the 1970s was Electra, the brand name used for electric guitars sold by St.
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