Magnatone

Paul Barth (1908–1976) was not peripheral to the history of the electric guitar — he was present at its creation. He helped George Beauchamp develop the horseshoe pickup, the first commercial electric guitar pickup, and was a founding shareholder of the Ro-Pat-In Company in 1931 — the company that became Rickenbacker. He remained at Rickenbacker through the Adolph Rickenbacker era and into F.C. Hall's ownership, leaving in 1957. During his time there he also employed a young Semie Moseley, who would go on to found Mosrite.

When Barth left Rickenbacker, he established his own guitar operation in Santa Ana, California. At Magnatone, Paul Bigsby had been designing guitars; when Bigsby departed in 1958, he specifically recommended Barth as his replacement. The result was a tight, somewhat tangled collaboration: the Mark VII, VIII, and IX guitars produced from 1959 to 1961 were built at Barth's own facility in Gardena and were, functionally, re-badged Barth Guitars — Magnatone simply swapped the headstock decal. The construction reflects Barth's origins: semi-hollow birch bodies (heavily routed core with separate top and back), bolt-on maple necks, rosewood fingerboards, and pickups descended from Bigsby's earlier Magnatone designs. The Mark VII was single-pickup; the Mark VIII dual-pickup; the Mark IX a stereo-output version of the VIII. All came in two-tone sunburst.

Barth returned to Magnatone in 1963 as a full-time designer, producing the Starstream series — Zephyr, Tornado, Typhoon, and Hurricane bass — a more ambitious catalog that was available for roughly a year in 1965–66 before Magnatone's ownership chaos (Estey Organ acquisition, relocation to Pennsylvania, eventual dissolution in 1968) ended it. Barth simultaneously ran Bartell of California with Ted Peckels from 1964 to 1969, producing around 2,000 instruments including a fretless guitar given to George Harrison in 1967.

The Barth/Magnatone instruments sit at an unusual intersection: Rickenbacker DNA, Bigsby lineage, Mosrite adjacency, and a construction approach closer to Danelectro or Harmony than to the premium guitars Barth had helped pioneer. Two dedicated reference sites document them in detail — The Canteen and Finding Fretless, both linked below.