Rickenbacker International Corporation is a string instrument manufacturer based in Santa Ana, California. The company is credited as the first known maker of electric guitars – a steel guitar in 1932 – and today produces a range of electric guitars and basses.
Dobro is an American brand of resonator guitars owned by Gibson and manufactured by its subsidiary Epiphone. The term "dobro" is also used as a generic term for any wood-bodied, single-cone resonator guitar.
The Carter Family was a traditional American folk music group that recorded between 1927 and 1956. Their music had a profound impact on bluegrass, country, Southern Gospel, pop and rock music as well as on the U.S. folk revival of the 1960s.
"Mother" Maybelle Carter was an American country musician and "among the first" to use the Carter scratch, with which she "helped to turn the guitar into a lead instrument." It was named after her. She was a member of the original Carter Family act from the late 1920s until the early 1940s and a member of the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle group.
An autoharp or chord zither is a string instrument belonging to the zither family. It uses a series of bars individually configured to mute all strings other than those needed for the intended chord. The term autoharp was once a trademark of the Oscar Schmidt company, but has become a generic designation for all such instruments, regardless of manufacturer.
The Appalachian dulcimer is a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings, originally played in the Appalachian region of the United States. The body extends the length of the fingerboard, and its fretting is generally diatonic.
The Selmer guitar — often called a Selmer-Maccaferri or just Maccaferri by English speakers, as early British advertising stressed the designer rather than manufacturer — is an unusual acoustic guitar best known as the favored instrument of Django Reinhardt. Selmer, a French manufacturer, produced the instrument from 1932 to about 1952.
The Ovation Guitar Company is a manufacturer of string instruments. Ovation primarily manufactures steel-string acoustic guitars and nylon-string guitars, often with pickups for electric amplification. In 2015, it became a subsidiary of Drum Workshop after being acquired from KMCMusicorp.
The Marxophone is a fretless zither played via a system of metal hammers. It features two octaves of double melody strings in the key of C major, and four sets of chord strings. Sounding somewhat like a mandolin, the Marxophone's timbre is also reminiscent of various types of hammered dulcimers.
Teisco was a Japanese musical instrument manufacturing company from 1948 until 1967, when the brand "Teisco" was acquired by Kawai. The company produced guitars as well as synthesizers, microphones, guitar amplifiers and drum kits. Teisco products were widely exported to the United States and the United Kingdom.
The ukelin is a stringed musical instrument made popular in the United States in the 1920s. It is a bowed psaltery with zither strings and its name derives from the ukulele and the violin. It lost popularity prior to the 1970s because the instrument was difficult to play and often returned to the manufacturer before it had been completely paid for.
The guitar zither is a musical instrument consisting of a sound-box with two sets of unstopped strings. One set of strings is tuned to the diatonic, chromatic, or partially chromatic scale and the other set is tuned to make the various chords in the principal key of the melody strings.
A resonator guitar or resophonic guitar is an acoustic guitar that produces sound by conducting string vibrations through the bridge to one or more spun metal cones (resonators), instead of to the guitar's sounding board (top). Resonator guitars were originally designed to be louder than regular acoustic guitars, which were overwhelmed by horns and percussion instruments in dance orchestras. They became prized for their distinctive tone, and found life with bluegrass music and the blues well after electric amplification solved the problem of inadequate volume.
The National String Instrument Corporation was an American guitar company first formed to manufacture banjos and then the original resonator guitars. National also produced resonator ukuleles and resonator mandolins. The company merged with Dobro to form the "National Dobro Company", then becoming a brand of Valco until it closed in 1968.
Beecher Ray "Pete" Kirby, better known as Bashful Brother Oswald, was an American country musician who popularized the use of the resonator guitar and Dobro. He played with Roy Acuff's Smoky Mountain Boys and was a member of the Grand Ole Opry.
Stella was an American guitar brand owned by the Oscar Schmidt Company. It was founded around 1899. The Stella brand consists of low and mid-level stringed instruments.
Carter Family picking, also known as the thumb brush, the Carter lick, the church lick, or the Carter scratch, is a style of fingerstyle guitar named after Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family. It is a distinctive style of rhythm guitar in which the melody is played on the bass strings, usually low E, A, and D while rhythm strumming continues above, on the treble strings, G, B, and high E. This often occurs during the break. The style bears similarity to the frailing style of banjo playing and is the rhythm Bill Monroe adapted for bluegrass music two decades later.
Oscar Schmidt was a musical instrument manufacturing company established in 1871. During its long existence, Oscar Schmidt has produced a wide range of string instruments, not only guitars but also numerous models of parlour instruments such as autoharps, celtic harps, guitar zithers, the "guitarophone", marxophones and bowed psalteries.
When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland: Their Complete Victor Recordings (1929–1930) is a compilation of recordings made by American country music group the Carter Family, released in 1995. It is the third of nine compilations released by Rounder Records of the group's Victor recordings. The original Carter Family group consisting of Alvin Pleasant "A.P." Delaney Carter, his wife Sara Dougherty Carter, and his sister-in-law Maybelle Addington Carter recorded many of what would become their signature songs for Victor Records.
Grimshaw Guitars was a British manufacturer of guitars and related instruments from the 1930s to the 1980s, known for producing acoustic archtop guitars in the 1930s–1940s, electrified archtop guitars in the 1940s and 1950s, semi-solid (thinline) electric guitars in the 1950s–1960s, and mainly solidbody guitars from the late 1950s to 1980s, along with smaller quantities of banjos, hawaiian guitars, electric bass guitars, acoustic guitars and nylon string guitars. Their archtop guitars were used by British players from the 1930s to the 1950s, when equivalent U.S.-made instruments were difficult to obtain in Britain, and their early electric thinline instruments such as the "S.S.1" and "S.S.1 deluxe" were popular with British "beat" groups of the early 1960s. Sales declined in the later 1960s and 1970s with easier access by customers to better made U.S. instruments at one end of the scale, and cheaper imported instruments, mostly from Japan, with which the Grimshaw line could not compete on price. The Grimshaw factory closed in the mid 1980s and its junior partner founder, Emile Grimshaw Jnr, passed away in 1987. Since that time, surviving instruments occasionally appear on the used market but tend to be somewhat overshadowed in favour of better known instruments of similar age by other British manufacturers such as Burns, Vox, etc.
