Guitars
Richard Harrison owns and operates several music retail stores in the United Kingdom including well-known stores on Denmark Street. The street in London is often called the English Tin Pan Alley with shop after shop offering guitars, basses, drums, saxophones, sheet music and so much more. The best...
Michael Compernass is the president of the Hoyer Guitar Company in Germany. Michael focuses on the history of the company’s innovative products, particularly those created by Arthur Hoyer in the late 1940s until his passing in 1967 and Arnold’s son, Walter, who ran the company for a decade. Michael...
Wally Evans grew up in Wales with music all around him. He played piano and sang in church. He later learned to play the guitar and worked in several bands at night and worked in a power plant by day. For two years he studied electronic musical instrument technology in London before being hired by...
Gary Stewart Hurst is known around the industry as “Gary the Fuzzman” for being the inventor of the Tone Bender fuzz pedal, which he began producing in the 1960s. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page started using Gary’s Tone Benders in 1965 and soon demand for his fuzz pedals came in from around the world....
Bruce Perrin is the Managing Director for Barnes & Mullins, located in Oswestry, England. The company was formed in 1895 and published the famous banjo magazine called “The Jo.” The company soon expanded to produce their own brand of banjos as well as importing instruments. Bruce became...
Dieter Roesberg made his mark as a rock musician in Germany during the 1970s, 80s and 90s, being part of several bands that scored hits on the charts. He kept a day job, a writer for Gitarre & Bass Magazine, while touring with his bands. One day he was made editor of the magazine and he had a...
Uli Kurtinat loved playing the guitar and wanted to be a rock star! He later worked for the Hoyer Guitar Company and began making his own guitars as well as working in retail stores as a luthier and repairman. It was there that the owner discovered Uli had a talent for selling musical instruments....
Dirk Kommer grew up close to Hohner, where he began his industry career as an apprentice in 1956. Over the years his dedication and passion for the products resulted in advances in duties. He was transferred to South Africa and back to Europe where he became the director of Hohner in London. When...
Frantisek Nemecek was born and raised in Czechoslovakia where he studied advertising and helped the more than 70 instrument makers in the area to sell their products. Frantisek began by exporting a large number of the instruments outside the area and into the Soviet Union, where the demand for hand...
Kurt Lutz was a well-regarded German luthier who, along with many other instrument makers, settled in Bubenreuth, Germany following World War II. Mr. Lutz provided a first-hand account of the era by explaining that the city council created a poster seeking to find instrument makers displaced by the...