Good question! I'm neither a luthier nor a musician. I have to "blame" Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones for it! Sounds crazy, or? He played that "strange" black ES-355 (at least I thought) in the Martin Scorsese "Shine a light" movie. I come back to that shortly.
Since I worked over 20 years for US companies I had collegues who were hobby musicians but had larger guitar collections, also whenever I had free time I visited every known guitar shop I could find on my business trips in the US. So I knew a bit about US guitars over time, I did factory tours at Martin, Fender, Taylor but was mainly in acoustic guitars initially. Not Guild however, I did'nt even know them. My first "electric" guitar was a black Taylor T5, that half acoustic/electric guitar Taylor had just introduced in 2005, I bought the 6 string in 2006 in the Beaverton, OR Guitar Center.
So back to "Shine a light". I had bought the DVD sometime in 2010 I believe and watched again and again what black guitar that is Keith played and gave to Buddy Guy. So I searched the internet and that is how I found out it was a
Guild Starfire! And I found that Keith also had that 10 string acoustic from Guild. As I had already seen them live and also had made a list of guitars he played at the concert I saw, Guild was a new name to me not present at the concert I saw in 2006.
So during my internet search for Guild I found LTG in 2010 and that is how I signed up and was fascinated by the knowledge here. I wasn't really into anything Gibson made at that time (neither acoustic nor electric) and thought that I have a Taylor T5 but could maybe also try such a Starfire IV (and not ES-335) as a "more electric" guitar. Also back during school a buddy of mine had a no-name semiacoustic in the ES-335 style which I loved playing. So I started my hunt for a Starfire IV, mainly because I always found guitars with bigsby as nothing I would ever use. Again, I'm no musician just a guitar lover.
And soon after I found a Cherry Starfire IV from 1967 (hence my user name here) in Brooklyn at Southside Guitars and bought her. And then I found out about the many differences in Starfire IV models over time (16th or 18th fret body joint, all the different pickups, body depth, dots or block inlays,...) and hence I started to create my own timelines of models and with being at LTG that quickly extended to all kind of other models and during that time I also started buying more guitars and so one thing came to another....
Also I have a friend who owns a music store here in Germany and he had given me a NAMM company pass, hence I visited NAMM when Ren Ferguson was in New Hartfort, so I had first hand experience when the Orpheum and American Patriarch lines came out in 2013 and was able talking to the Fender and Guild people there, met Doyle Dykes there and so on. And after beeing at concerts seeing Mark Knopfler, Dave Gilmore, Eric Clapton, Joe Bonamassa,... I also started creating lists of guitars they used so I started learning also about all the other "famous" vintage guitars and gained some knowledge in that field I'd say. And as I travelled a lot to Japan as well I also found some interest in tracking down info about all the Japanese Guild copies from the 70ies.
And I think Hans explains how he came to Guild early in his book.
Ralf
). I love reading your posts about them
