Disclaimer The Guitardater Project cannot verify the authenticity of ANY Guitar, this site is simply meant as a tool to satisfy the curiosity of guitar enthusiasts. This website possesses NO DATABASE of guitars made by manufactures, instead simple serial code patterns that are available on this site and in the wider guitar community are used. It follows that potential scammers can use this knowledge to try to trick unsuspecting buyers. If you have any doubts as to a guitars’ authenticity please contact the guitar manufacturer before your purchase.
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The Interwebs are sorely lacking on search results for these guitars! There's a particular one for sale on my local Craigslist, which is why I started researching. I thought Suzuki guitars were 70's creations only, and inexpensive student guitars at that. However, the seller claims this particular Suzuki dreadnaught is from the early 90's and that it's a quality all solid-wood build. The name on the headstock says 'Suzuki Triple S' and the model is AD320. Does anyone have a Blue Book with more info?
Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Some years ago I had a cutaway Nagoya acoustic. I can't remember the model number but the headstock as the same as the W 120 on the internet. The finish was a dark tobacco sunburst, very pretty! I think it was a laminate but that certainly didn't affect the sound, very well balanced with enough sound for anyone. Lovely neck shape and feel, used regularly at home and on holidays, sessions and even trying to support a VERY loud bluegrass banjo. I never had a problem with the instrument losing tuning, lifting the bridge, neck needing a reset or any of the many and varied problems which can attack a guitar over the 15 or so years I owned it.
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My friends also played it - a variety of styles, all liked it. Eventually sold (with a clear conscience) to a friend when I upgraded to a Guild. Suzuki was making guitars fro a long long time, maybe they exported mainly laminates, can`t say for sure, but I`ve found a few all solids over here. I checked a site that has catalogs including Suzuki but didn`t see the model you listed so I didn`t post a link in this thread. I`ll post pics of the labels of those I own that are solid wood.
This is a `48 nylon string. A 1950 Kiso Suzuki. I`ve got three of these, no dates on the labels, but two are certainly solid.
Kiso Suzuki Guitars For Sale
One, the most recent, I`m not sure about, but if I had to bet I`d say yes. All three have different colored labels but all have the diamond cut bracing. Heres what the diamond cut bracing looks like. Here is a link to a site with some Suzukis.none of the labels on mine appear there, and some of the data they have conflicts with the guitars I own so I can`t swear the info there is accurate, in fact I know some isn`t but it`s very difficult finding stuff on many old MIJs I own, I`ve got a whole bunch in the 'unsolved mystery' file, but hey, whatever.I buy em to play, guess I`ll just have to struggle through life not knowing everything there is to know about some of my oldies. As long as they sound good, I`m happy.
I have still got a Nagoya Suzuki w-120VSC cutaway tobacco sunburst exactly as you describe. I bought it new in about 1983 and you are right -it is a fantastic guitar for the money. Although I use a Takamine en-20 (another 1980s relic)for gigging, the Suzuki is the first choice at home for composing or noodling about on. The action is fantastic and the sound is well rounded.
It hasn't got the volume or tone of the Tak, but it's a much nicer guitar to play. My wife won't play any other and she won't let me sell it! I have never adjusted anything other than replacing strings in all those years. It's hard to fault really. The build quality is good -the g string sometimes 'jumps' or clicks when you tune it and the intonation gets a bit suspect right up past the 12th. These could probably be sorted easily, although i've never felt the need. Apart from a few chips, the finish has stayed in remarkably good condition(compared with the Tak which is disintigrating around the soundhole).
I think I paid about. You might want to check the archives here as well.
There was a thread on guitars branded 'Nagoya' that I guess were Suzukis. No really good records on these things. Mine is in my lap as I speak. Just boned the bridge. It's about a '72 model, as far as I can tell. Solid spruce top, and the sides and back appear, to the best of my ability to determine, to be solid EIR. Mine is a true copy of a contemporaneous Martin, down to the oversized rosewood bridge plate.
It was manufactured as a 'House Brand' for a local music store in the D.C. Point being, though they made a lot of student level stuff, they were capable of turning out better guitars.
$350 sounds a little steep, but with a good hardshell case, it's not out of the ballpark. Compare it to other guitars in he price range, like the Yamaha 7XXS series, and make up your own mind. Only rule of thumb I haveis, If it sounds good, it is good.
This is a blog dedicated to older Suzuki Guitars. Suzuki Guitars have been around since the early 1900's and have attracted a growing interest by players and collectors alike. Many guitar players own more than one guitar, yet a common story it seems is that the Suzuki guitar is the one played most often, or that stays with them when all others are sold.
The company may be known by the generic label 'Suzuki', but there are actually three different Japanese companies that have manufactured guitars under the name of Suzuki during the 50's to the present time - but all having a common ancestry. Kiso-Suzuki was one company to manufacture guitars in the region of Kiso-prefecture.
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A company was started in Nagoya too - Suzuki Violin Company, Nagoya manufacturing about the same number of models as Kiso, but with different numbers. Today, there is a company called 'Suzuki Musical Instrument CO.'
And it has no relation to the other Suzuki companies, but was started by Manji Suzuki, whose guitars used to be labelled with the 'M Suzuki' label. Good guitars it seems. Suzuki Guitar Repair and Modification Info. (for the hacker like me) Questions. 'I have a Suzuki Guitar, but it doesn't sound as good as I had hoped for.' If you have a Suzuki guitar that doesn't sound so great. Not every Suzuki guitar is equal to an 'inheritance' guitar.
But, some are. Some may just require a setup to sound better; others may be too heavily built or have intonation problems (personal experience with some steel strings built by Kiso.see the W300D video. The frets are a bit off compared to a Martin fretboard, same scale length). (the information below is from R.M. Mottola, a well-known and respected luthier, editor, and author. I posed the question to him in an email and he kindly responded and gave me permission to quote the following response.).check out his interesting web site - 'If you have read my site in any depth you will know that I am not one for simple answers, and there is no exception here. There are a number of variables here which should be considered.
What exactly is meant by the term laminated top? Does it mean conventional wood laminates with the grain orientation of the middle ply at 90 deg. To the outside plys? Could it mean a wood laminate where grain orientation was aligned for all plys?
Could it include a center ply that is not wood at all, as in so called double top construction? And then there is the issue of what the term 'sound as good' means and implies. What sounds good to folks most often is what sounds most familiar. And it is certainly true that the musical material played on any type of instrument evolved along with the instrument, and exploits the features and works around the shortcomings of that type. These two factors conspire to make instruments with construction that deviates significantly from the norm for the type to be perceived as sounding not as good sometimes.
Kiso Suzuki Violin
My general observation of sonic differences between instruments with solid wood tops and wood laminated tops with center ply at 90 deg. Is that the laminated top instruments offer less overall sustain. In musical styles and applications where sustain is considered to be a good thing, then laminated top instruments are generally perceived as tonally inferior.
Painting with a broad brush, this means classical and steel string acoustic guitars. Less sustain generally provides more perceived separation of notes of chords and in applications where this is a desirable feature, such as in archtop jazz guitars and other applications where complex chords are a key tonal element, laminated top instruments are more well received. It is my observation that, if one judges acoustic bass guitars by how close they sound to pizz upright bass, that reduced sustain helps to move the tone in that direction. That said, I have heard nice sounding ABGs with laminated tops. Let me briefly touch on less conventional types of laminated tops.
In my observation the so called double top classical guitars (which make use of spruce laminated with a central core of honeycomb Kevlar) sound no worse but certainly no better as a class than instruments using solid wood tops. I have heard good sounding instruments that made use of laminated top where the grain orientation of the plys was the same, but not enough to come to any conclusions about this class of construction. Hope this helps; best of luck with your project.' Mottola Liutaio Mottola Stringed Instrument Design Nonprofit Technical Design and Research for the Lutherie Community See the Liutaio Mottola Lutherie Information Website at Technology editor and contributing editor for American Lutherie, the stringed instrument makers' journal of the Guild of American Luthiers. See the G.A.L.
Kiso Suzuki Classical Guitar
Editor of the Savart Journal, the online research journal of science and technology of stringed musical instruments. Eccotemp 12-lp. See the Savart Journal website.
Member, New England Luthiers. See the NEL website. Masakichi Suzuki (1859-1944)was Japan's first violin producer.
His father was a samurai moonlighter who also made shamisens in Nagoya. Masakichi succeeded his father's craft business that soon failed. In the push for westernization in Meiji, he naturally became interested in shamisen's western counterpart: violin.
In the 1880s, he started to manually produce and sell violins. He founded the Suzuki Violin Factory in 1900.
By 1910, his factory was producing 65,800 violins per year. Nagoya became the manufacturing center of string musical instruments. There was 'one' Suzuki company before the 2nd World War. After the war, a entity created by the US and allies called GHQ (for General Headquarters) dismantled some parts of 'Imperial' Japan and some companies were closed or restructured. In Suzuki's case, the company was separated into - the Suzuki Violin Company, changing to the Kiso Suzuki Violin Company and the Suzuki Violin Manufacturing Company came to be called the Nagoya Suzuki Violin Company. Kiso Suzuki went bankrupt in 1987 and the machines and materials were sold to ESP.
Nagoya Suzuki stopped making guitars in 1989. Many guitar players own more than one guitar, yet a common story it seems is that the Suzuki guitar is the one played most often, or that stays with them when all others are sold. Re: the serial number: on many of the models the first one or two numbers in the serial number stands for the year in which it was manufactured; from the 60’s to the 80’s. I have never seen a definite 1950's guitar yet, mainly because I don't know enough about them yet.The other prefixes/suffixes.W, C, S, VS, D, G, A, T, R, O, J.may follow other common meanings.
W = Western model F= Folk Model FM = Flame Maple C= Cutaway E=Electronics K=? S=Spruce (top) VS= Violin Sunburst color D=Dreadnaught shape G=Grand Concert shape for classicals; some 'G' acoustics however had a large Gibson-type headstock A=? Takeharu sometimes R=? J=Jumbo shape (if you can help with understanding their system, please DO write me at [email protected]!).
Unfortunally ESP didn't keep good records of old serial numbers. Many records have been lost during years and most of all were destroyed in a fire accident on late '90s in ESP Japan factory. For old guitars we can only know the exact data reading the ESP warranty card (when there is), or unscrewing the neck (if the neck is bolt on) and read under it becuse probably theres the data write on pencil). I keep record of this data in order to try to deduce other correspondences.
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ESP Guitar Company says: 'Unfortunately the factories at ESP Japan have not kept a consistent and sensible serial number tracking system in place over the years. This has resulted in alot of confusion, and.
You may still come across the occasional serial number that may conflict with, or doesn't fall under any of the listed categories. For this we apologize, and we are working to maintain a more consistent system going forward. The PRE-2015 system doesn't apply to early ESP's, some of which had no serial number tracking system at all and used random numbers. Thanks for your understanding.' NOTES ON SERIAL NUMBERS.
Some of the ESPs have black hardware in North America and Black Nickel hardware elsewhere. It all began a few years ago with the EU and a thing called the RoHS (Regulation of Hazardous Materials) and Gotoh in Japan basically changed their production to ensure they didn’t lose the European market, and that being manufacturers who shipped to Europe, which is most everyone. They changed pretty much everything for the “export” market, and export to most makers means anything but US. Kind of a long story. They have a way of producing black again now so expect it to all go back to the way most of us prefer over time. NOTES: - year '7' can be 1987 or 1997, '8' can be 1988 or 1998, '9' can be 1989 or 1999! You have to look at the models in production that year.
sometimes in old guitars (80s early 90s) first digit is missing when is '0' and the serial is 7 digits total (ex. 3038467, means number 467) - lot of old esp's does not have any serial on the back of the headstock. If you are lucky you can find a serial written on pencil where the body is bolted to the neck (or in the neck also) or in the pickup cavity. SERIAL UNDER PICKUPS. NN = production number For example my MX-220 have serial ' #80129' that means was made the 08-1991 number 29) 5 DIGITS punched in the bolt plate (for the bolt on versions).
NOTE: Follow this reference may not be accurate because probably they printed a certain number of plates and then put on guitars in a random manner, without noticing consecutive numeration. This is the reason why we can easilu find guitars with the bolt plate referring to a year or two before or after respect the serial printed on the back of the headstock. To have an exact dating of this guitars you have to unscrew the neck and look at the date could be written below. 1988 - 1989 - 592XX 1990 - 1991 - 1992 - 601XX - 618XX 1993 - 619XX - 912XX 1994 - 166XX - 183XX 1995 - 191XX - 244XX 1996 - 257XX - 261XX 1997 - 273XX - 294XX 1998 - 301XX - 357XX 1999 - 339XX - 369XX 2000 - 379XX - 387XX 2001 - 388XX - 416XX 2002 - 402XX 2003 - 4170X.
PP YY WW D NN (stamped on the back of the headstock). PP = place of manufacture: K = ESP Kiso Factory (Japan) / set-neck and neck-thru only; S = ESP Sado Factory (Japan) / bolt-on only; T = ESP Takada Factory (Japan) / ESP Custom Shop SS = ESP Standard Factory / Signature Series or Standard Series CH = Craft House CS = Craft House (used rarely) TH = Technical House N = Nagano Factory YY = last two digits of the year WW = week of the year (max.52) D = day of that week: 1 = monday, 2 = tuesday. (max.7) NN = number off the line that day (max.99) EXAMPLE: the code of my MX-250 K0604202 means the manufacturing date is and it was the 2nd guitar built that day.
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