Jeff said:
Perhaps Hans new book will have a paragraph or two on the subject.
Hello everybody,
There will be a paragraph on the subject of model designations in the new book, but only for the models that were introduced after 1977, which is where the first book ends.
As I've already pointed out in the first book ( on page 48) Guild had never been consistent in the use of numbers and letters in it's model designations from day one.
The first G-model was the G-37, which was introduced during the early seventies. While I was doing the research for the first book, I interviewed several people who were involved at that time but none of them could give me a good explanation why the G-prefix was chosen for a 'new' model that was basically a D-shaped guitar.
From the different answers I got I kind of 'made up' my own explanation. It looks like it was probably too confusing to have more D-models in a factory situation, where too many numbers (that were too close together) would be a cause for mistakes. Introducing another model prefix would 'give some air' to the model line and it would be easier for the workers to get used to the new models next to the old ones that were already established.
The next available letter after F was G. It almost sounds too simple but that's all I can make of it.
The fact that they gave the same G-name to 3 entirely different shaped models, the G-37, the G-41 and the G-75, may seem odd at first sight but it was not different from what they did in the early '50s, when they called every flat top an F-model and those were all differently shaped models as well. So I guess you could call Guild very consistent in it's inconsistency.
The G in the GF-models that were introduced during the '80s has nothing to do with the original G-name.
Hope this explains some of it but basically, there's no such thing as a 'G' body style.
Sincerely,
Hans Moust
http://www.guitarsgalore.nl
