Takamine Guitars

Most people who know the name Takamine know it from a stage. The brand is on more touring guitars than almost any other — the instrument plugged in at the side of the stage, amplified through a PA to a stadium, behaving itself night after night. That reputation rests on one engineering decision taken in 1978. What it tends to obscure is that the company began as a maker of classical guitars, has never stopped building them, and still assembles its best instruments by hand in the same small Gifu town where a typhoon deposited its founder in 1959.

A Typhoon, and a Move Inland

The company’s own history starts not with ambition but with a disaster.

Its founder was a craftsman working in a stringed-instrument factory in the Nagoya region. In September 1959 the Isewan Typhoon — known in English as Typhoon Vera, the deadliest storm in modern Japanese history — tore through Ise Bay and the Nagoya plain. He lost his work, and like a great many people that autumn he started again somewhere else.

That somewhere was Sakashita, his wife’s home town, inland in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture. In December 1959 he opened his own workshop there under his own name: 大曽根楽器製作所, Ōsone Gakki Seisakusho — the Ōsone Musical Instrument Manufacturing Works.

Sakashita was a sensible place to land. It was a woodworking town, with a local timber and joinery trade and, more to the point, a supply of craftsmen who already knew how to work wood accurately. A luthier arriving from the coast with nothing could hire skilled hands locally. Most of Japan’s guitar industry grew up this way, in furniture and woodworking districts rather than in cities.

The Mountain Gives Its Name

In May 1962, with the staff grown to around thirty, the workshop was renamed. It took its name from Mount Takamine (高峰山), the peak visible from the shop.

This is the date almost everyone cites as the company’s founding, and it is the date Takamine itself lists as its establishment — it counted its sixtieth anniversary in 2022, not 2019. It is worth being precise about what happened: the business began in December 1959 and was renamed in 1962. The name on the headstock is a mountain, not a person — a point that confuses people who assume there was once a luthier called Takamine.

Gut Strings First

For its first decade and more, Takamine built classical guitars — gut and later nylon strung. At the founding it was one of only a handful of Japanese workshops concentrating on them.

The timing was commercial rather than artistic. Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s was in the middle of a broad popular appetite for the guitar, driven by the enormously popular kayōkyoku and enka songs of the Koga melody era, in which the nylon-string guitar was a standard voice. Demand was large and the instrument in demand was a classical. By 1965 the staff had reached sixty, the firm had incorporated, mandolins had been added, and exports had begun.

Like most Japanese makers of the period, Takamine also built under other people’s names. Through the 1960s and early 1970s instruments left Sakashita branded Elite, Nashville and others, alongside contract work for foreign importers. The company was a capable manufacturer long before it was a brand.

Mass Hirade

The figure who turned the factory into a name was Mass Hirade (平出益郎), a trained luthier who arrived in 1968 as head of design and production.

Hirade’s contribution was twofold. He raised what came off the benches — reworking designs and manufacturing methods at a company that until then had been building competently to a price. And he had ambitions well beyond the domestic market. By 1970 he was president, and the policy he pursued for the next several years was to put the company’s own name on its own guitars and sell them abroad.

In the early 1970s that produced the partnership that made Takamine’s reputation in America: distribution through Kaman Music, the Connecticut company behind Ovation and one of the most effective instrument distributors in the United States. A small Gifu workshop suddenly had a route into every American music store.

Hirade stood down from the presidency in 1977, succeeded by Ichiro Katayama. His name did not leave the company. It is still on its classical guitars.

Sigma, and the Lawsuit That Wasn’t

One episode gets repeated constantly and told wrongly about as often, so it is worth setting down carefully.

In the late 1960s C. F. Martin, looking for instruments it could sell at prices its Pennsylvania factory could not match, had steel-string guitars built in Japan to its designs and sold them under the Sigma name. Takamine was among the Japanese makers producing them. The arrangement ran until the American wholesaler handling the line was bought by Kaman — Ovation’s parent, and Martin’s competitor — at which point Martin ended it.

Separately, in the early 1970s, Takamine’s own steel-strings carried a headstock shape and logo script uncomfortably close to Martin’s, and some models leaned on Guild as well. Martin’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter. Takamine changed the designs.

Those early squared-headstock instruments have been known among collectors ever since as “lawsuit” guitars — but no lawsuit was ever filed. The matter was settled by letter, as these things usually are. The guitars are collectable because they are early, well made and visually distinctive, not because of any courtroom drama.

Hotel California

The brand’s arrival in the wider public consciousness came in 1977, and not through advertising. Glenn Frey of the Eagles played a Takamine EF400S twelve-string on Hotel California — the twelve-string figure that opens the song.

Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne were playing Takamines in the same period. For a Japanese maker still largely unknown outside the trade, this was the kind of exposure no budget buys.

The Palathetic Pickup

Everything Takamine is now known for rests on work done in 1978.

Amplifying an acoustic guitar was, at that point, an unsolved problem. Magnetic soundhole pickups heard the strings but not the guitar. Microphones heard the guitar and also the drummer, and fed back the moment the stage got loud. Early under-saddle strips picked up the top’s movement indiscriminately, so one string would boom while another vanished.

Takamine’s answer was the Palathetic pickup: an under-saddle system carrying six individual piezo transducers, one per string, each separately shielded, in a housing substantial enough to be a structural part of the bridge rather than a strip laid under it.

Six separate elements mean each string is sensed on its own, so balance across the set is a design parameter rather than an accident of how the saddle happens to be seated. Individual shielding keeps stage electrical noise out. The weight and rigidity of the housing resist feedback at volume. It is a solution aimed squarely at the working player on a loud stage, and it worked.

Development had an unusual collaborator. Ry Cooder was given a prototype and pushed back on it in detail, and his feedback shaped the revisions. Cooder’s own guitar had been modified by a young Californian luthier named Lloyd Baggs, who studied the problem alongside — and whose company, LR Baggs, went on to become one of the defining names in acoustic amplification. Takamine and Baggs have collaborated since.

The first production instrument with the pickup, the PT-007S, appeared in 1979, released abroad before it was sold at home. In its essentials the Palathetic design has not changed in more than forty years.

Preamps, and the Habit of Building the Electronics

Having solved the pickup, Takamine kept going into the electronics — which is unusual. Most guitar makers buy a preamp in.

• 1988 — a single-unit preamp combining circuit and battery in one swappable module, so a failure on tour meant a replacement rather than a repair
• Late 1980s — the AAP, bringing parametric EQ to an onboard preamp, and a DSP unit developed with Korg offering reverb and stored presets
• 1998 — the AD-1, described by the company as the first onboard digital preamp of its kind, alongside a two-way truss rod developed with Gotoh
• 2004 — the CT or Cool Tube series, putting a genuine low-voltage valve stage inside an acoustic guitar

A modular approach ran through all of it, so preamps could be swapped and upgraded rather than soldered in for life.

The Limited Editions

Since 1987 Takamine has released a Limited Edition every year — a run of a few hundred instruments built around a single theme, usually expressed through inlay work, and not repeated. The series is the company’s standing demonstration that the factory which supplies the world’s touring guitarists can also build to any standard it chooses. Laser-guided CNC machinery arrived in 1993 largely in service of the inlays.

The most significant of them is the LTD2022, built for the company’s sixtieth anniversary — counted, as above, from the 1962 renaming.

It is a deliberate look backwards. The body is an X-braced concert shape with a solid Sitka spruce top over koa back and sides, a mahogany neck and an ebony fingerboard carrying a diamond-shaped inlay at the twelfth fret, with abalone purfling and an abalone rosette. Koa is the nod to the company’s own early instruments rather than to current fashion.

The electronics make the same point. Rather than fit the latest preamp, Takamine developed a FET-based circuit voiced after the preamps in its own late-1970s instruments — nicknamed the Brownie, after the brown control panel of the original bridge-mounted system — aiming for the warmer character of the early electronics, with a chromatic tuner and a notch filter added for the people who will actually gig it.

The Hirade Classicals

Here is the part that gets lost under the stadium reputation. Takamine never abandoned the instrument it started with, and its classical guitars carry the name of the man who ran the company: Hirade.

They are built by hand at Sakashita, and the specification is conservative in the way a serious classical guitar should be. The long-running H8SS carries a solid spruce top with Spanish fan bracing, solid quarter-sawn Indian rosewood back and sides, a mahogany neck with an ebony fingerboard, a 650 mm scale and a 51 mm bone nut, a rosewood bridge, and engraved gold Gotoh tuners with pearl buttons. The H5 is its cedar-topped sibling, warmer and quicker to respond.

One departure from classical orthodoxy is deliberate and worth knowing about: the Hirade necks carry a truss rod, which traditional classical guitars do not. Purists object. Anyone who has watched a nylon-string neck drift over twenty years in a centrally-heated house can see the argument on the other side. It is a production maker’s decision — built to survive conditions the builder will never see — and it is consistent with everything else about the company.

The line has run through a long list of variants since the early 1990s: the H8 and H8SS, the H5 and H15, the cutaway and oval-soundhole HE and TH models with Palathetic pickups and Cool Tube preamps fitted, and the HD90. Reviewers describe the voice as full and clear, strongly projecting, and notably even from bass to treble — which is what a well-made, well-braced spruce-and-rosewood classical should sound like.

Where They Are Made

Takamine today is a deliberately split operation, and knowing which side of the line an instrument falls on tells you most of what you need to know about it.

The Japanese-built instruments — the Pro Series, the Limited Editions, the Hirade classicals — are made at Sakashita, where a workforce of around ninety builds with CNC machining for the precision work and hand assembly for the rest. The G Series and the entry-level models are built outside Japan to keep the price accessible, with simpler electronics.

This is the same decision every surviving Japanese maker has had to take, and Takamine has at least taken it transparently rather than quietly moving everything offshore and keeping the prices.

The company remains in Sakashita, where a new headquarters and main factory opened in 2005, and sells through distributors in more than sixty countries. Since 2015 its North American distribution has been handled by ESP.

Gifu Again

It is worth noticing where this story takes place. Takamine is at Sakashita in Nakatsugawa; K. Yairi is at Kani; TFG Craft is at Seki. All three are in Gifu Prefecture, within a short drive of each other.

That is not coincidence. Gifu is mountain and timber country with a deep woodworking tradition, and when Japan’s guitar industry grew in the post-war decades it grew where the wood and the woodworkers already were. The prefecture has quietly become the centre of Japanese acoustic guitar making, and Takamine is the largest thing in it.

The Essentials

1. Founded December 1959 in Sakashita, Gifu, as Ōsone Gakki Seisakusho, after Typhoon Vera destroyed the founder’s livelihood near Nagoya
2. Renamed Takamine in May 1962 after Mount Takamine, the peak overlooking the workshop — the name is a mountain, not a maker
3. Built classical guitars first, and has never stopped
4. Mass Hirade joined in 1968 as head of design and production, became president in 1970, and drove the company’s expansion abroad through Kaman Music
5. Built steel-strings for Martin’s Sigma line; the early “lawsuit” headstocks were settled by a cease-and-desist letter, with no suit ever filed
6. Glenn Frey played a Takamine EF400S twelve-string on Hotel California in 1977
7. The Palathetic pickup — six individually shielded piezo elements, one per string — arrived in 1978, with Ry Cooder and Lloyd Baggs involved in its development
8. First production acoustic-electric, the PT-007S, in 1979; the design is essentially unchanged today
9. Developed its own preamps, including a Korg-designed DSP unit and the Cool Tube valve series
10. Has issued a themed Limited Edition every year since 1987; the LTD2022 marked the sixtieth anniversary in koa and abalone, with a preamp voiced after the company’s own late-1970s electronics
11. The Hirade classical line is hand-built at Sakashita: 650 mm scale, 51 mm nut, solid spruce or cedar over solid Indian rosewood, with a truss rod

There is a particular kind of maker that never quite gets its due, because what it solved was a practical problem rather than an artistic one. Takamine worked out how to make an acoustic guitar behave on a loud stage, and did it so thoroughly that the problem stopped being discussed. The consequence is that a company which began building nylon-string guitars in a mountain town, and still builds them there by hand, is known to most of the world as the brand on the guitar the singer plugs in. Both things are true, and the second one would not have happened without the first.

A history of Takamine, the Japanese guitar maker of Sakashita, Nakatsugawa, Gifu Prefecture