cheap, bottom of the range) in the ’60s and perhaps into the early ’70s.Īnyone know anything more about these? I can see from my site stats and search engine feedback that this is a very frequently-viewed post and a lot of people are clearly researching Hoyer/Rosetti guitars! All suggestions as to what my guitar is, and how old it might be, welcomed. **Actually, it’s probably newer than that: I’ve since found pictures of a Hoyer of identical shape sold as a ‘student guitar’ (i.e. The tone’s bright and clear – whilst it’s clearly no Gibson L5, it’s got a real retro sound and is great fun to play.
A quick squizz round eBay and Google, and I’d put it at 1950s**.Īll parts, including the bridge, tailpiece and tuning pegs, look original, and whilst it’s missing its scratchplate, it’s got all its period charm… It holds its tune – the neck is glued straight, even if the work’s not pretty – and M has refretted it and raised the action.
The inlay detailing on the neck is to a Hoyer design, the wood matches up perfectly, so I reckon it’s a safe bet this is a Hoyer, marketed in the UK by Rosetti. Rosetti, meanwhile, never actually made its own guitars: it was a distribution company (the main distributors for Gibson in the UK at one point) but also imported cheap guitars (mostly Dutch-made, but a few German) for sale under its own brand-name. Not so: Hoyer, a German guitar-maker which seems to have been similar in its range to Hofner or Framus, made a number of cheap guitars for export, it seems. The usual guitar-traders that prowl the market first thing passed it over: one told the seller that ‘it’s 2 different guitars glued together’ as the plate on the headstock reads ‘Rosetti’ and a stamp on the body ‘Arnold Hoyer’. I found this late last year at the Brighton station Sunday market and thought it’d be worth a chance at £15 – and it plays far better than any guitar so messily glued-up at the neck has any right to do. Interest declined in the 1970s and 1980s, as many guitarists switched to solid body guitars, but archtops became popular again in the 1990s, as luthiers made innovations to the design, while keeping them attractive to collectors.This has been to M – luthier and banjo-maker – for a set-up and a general tidying. These early electric archtop guitars became popular with country and jazz acts, and helped to lay the groundwork for what became rock 'n' roll. In the 1930s, body sizes grew from 15 to 18 inches, and the acoustic archtop guitar was finally loud enough to become a solo instrument.Įlectric archtops became common in the late 1940s and early 1950s, thanks to amplifiers becoming louder and more powerful. Archtops boomed in popularity, as country, jazz and bluegrass acts adopted the guitar as their own. Thankfully, jazz musicians proved the guitar was still a viable instrument, and many chose archtops as their guitar of choice. The first redesign, the Gibson L5, was initially a flop, but has remained in production and is highly revered by archtop guitar fans.īy the end of World War I, banjos and mandolins were more in fashion than guitars.
The guitars had an oval sound hole instead of the famous "f" hole of later models, which became widespread in 1922, when Lloyd Loar was hired by the Gibson Company to redesign its instruments. The early arch tops were made with cello-like bridges and tailpieces, and the neck had to form a certain angle with the soundbox. The method was expensive, but continues today in many arch top models. Gibson's mandolin differed from traditional versions of the instrument in that it had an arched top and back, similar to the look of a violin, and didn't have many of the normal internal features, like blocks and bridges, because he believed they took a great bit away from the tone of the instrument. Gibson believed unstressed wood had the superior vibration abilities, and in 1902, he formed the Gibson-Mandolin Guitar Company. Archtop guitars date back to the 19th Century, when Orville Gibson shaped the guitar's sides and tops from blocks of wood.