About

Where this came from

Guitar Story is a brand lineage research project kept by two researchers who love the guitar: Greg Maly and Anand Varghese.

Starting with our own guitars

It began with a question about the instruments we own. Where did they come from? The name on the headstock was the easy part. Who owned that name in the year the guitar was built, and which factory built it, was much harder. The answers were scattered across forums, serial-number charts, brand histories and price guides, and those sources often disagreed.

A brand is not the same as a maker. The logo can stay put for decades while the company behind it is sold and the factory moves across town or across an ocean.

So what does it take to answer the question properly?

Following the supply chain

For one guitar, it meant tracing owners and plants. To do it well, we had to go further down: contract factories that build for several brands at once, the mills and suppliers that feed them, the wood itself, and the rules that govern where that wood can travel. A question about our own guitars turned into a research project about the whole supply chain behind guitar builders.

The unit we track is the era: a stretch of time on one product line when the owner and the plant were both constant. A new era starts when either one changes. An owner can change while the plant stays the same, and that still counts as a new era.

Showing our work

Every fact on the site carries a citation, and every page ends with its sources. Every dated fact shows how reliable its best source is. Where credible sources disagree, we keep each version, mark the one we use, and show the others as alternatives. Eras are computed from those facts. Nobody types one in by hand, so correcting one date corrects every era it touches.

Ten brands to start

We are starting with ten: Guild, Gretsch, Heritage, Epiphone, Martin, Taylor, Ibanez, PRS, Ovation, and Harmony. We will add more over time.

In the meantime, pick a brand and see where yours was built, and who the owners were at the time.