Gretsch

Gretsch

Friedrich Gretsch founded his instrument company in Brooklyn in 1883, initially making banjos and drums before expanding into guitars in the 1930s. The models that defined the brand arrived in the 1950s — the White Falcon, the hollow-body Chet Atkins series, the Country Gentleman — built around Filter'Tron humbuckers and Bigsby vibratos into a sound that George Harrison, Eddie Cochran, Duane Eddy, and Brian Setzer would each make their own. The company sold to Baldwin in 1967 and went through a period of decline; Fred Gretsch III revived the brand in 1989, and a partnership with Fender from 2002 brought the reissue program to its current scale.

The modern reissues — built primarily by Terada in Japan — are what most collectors encounter today, and they're better than their reputation sometimes suggests. The Japanese-built Gretsches were part of what shifted this collection's perspective on Japanese guitar manufacturing generally: instruments that reward close attention to spec and year over blanket assumptions about quality.

Gretsch also owned Bigsby from 1999 to 2019, an acquisition that made sense given how central the Bigsby vibrato has always been to the Gretsch identity. Fender acquired Bigsby in 2019.