Gibson Guitar Corporation

Previous LocationKalamazoo, Michigan, USA

ActiveNashville, Tennessee, USA

BiographyThe Gibson Guitar Corporation was founded in 1902 by Orville Gibson (1856 – 1918) as The Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company Limited. The company was initially based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a city just south of Grand Rapids and west of Detroit, until it began relocating to Nashville, Tennessee in 1974 following a brief financial slump, which is where it is currently headquartered. Gibson began research in instrument building in 1894 with a mandolin design – for which he also received a patent – that proved to be more durable and easy to manufacture than its predecessors. In the early 1930s, Gibson began experiments in the manufacture of magnetic pickups, enlisting the help of American swing musician Alvino Rey, who is often considered the founder of the pedal steel guitar, and engineers at the Lyon & Healy company in Chicago, which were to be used in the company’s first electric guitars. It was Gibson’s in-house electrical engineer Walter Fuller who finalized the unique hexagonal design that featured in these instruments. Gibson first attached their pickup to a lap steel model in 1935, and later to an archtop model, known as the ES-150 or “Electric Spanish”, which, in May of 1936, represented the first commercial electric guitar released by the company. In 1944, Gibson was subsumed under Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI) and, in 1952, released their first solid-body model, the Les Paul, which was named in recognition of the musician who helped design the instrument along with Gibson president Ted McCarty, and who is also considered one of the founders of the technology. In 1969, Chicago Musical Instruments was purchased by ECL Gibson Incorporated, a South American company that remained in control of CMI until 1974 when the Norlin Musical Instruments subsidiary was jointly established between ECL and CMI. Beginning in 1974, manufacture of Gibson instruments began shifting from Kalamazoo to Nashville, Tennessee, with all production consolidating in that city by 1984. Two satellite factories were opened several years later in Memphis, Tennessee and Bozeman, Montana, the latter of which is solely responsible for the production of Gibson’s acoustic instruments. Today, Gibson operates several branches, including Gibson USA, which was created in 1974 for the exclusive production of the Les Paul series. Gibson also produces instruments such as mandolins and banjos, as well as amplification devices.