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FUJIGEN (FGN) guitars
Heritage factory set up in 1960 based in Matsumoto, Japan and responsible for MANY of the larger brands most successful guitars – think MIJ Fender strats from the late 80’s to mid 90’s, Yamaha artist basses, Ibanez Prestige. Wanting to have a little more control over their futures they are focussing more on their own brand FGN Fujigen electric guitars & basses, which are all 100% hand made in the same factory. Great history, great guitars, great price points.
DOWINA guitars
Established just outside of Bratislava, Slovakia near the banks of the Danube in the 1970’s as a violin luthier, Stan leads Dowina acoustic guitars and spends the majority of his time travelling the world sourcing woods and hand selecting top material. Three distinct product levels – Antique, where the solid tops are selected by Stan and then sent to the Cort factory for glue work before being returned where Stands team then finishes the necks, fretting, electrics & set ups. Then you have Vintage, 100% solid, 100% made in smaller batches by the craftsmen in Slovakia. Select woods, beautiful attention to detail and competitively priced with some great Hybrid classical models and finishes. Finally, the Master range are all hand made by Stan from the best woods available and highlight the workmanship that comes from this workshop
RECORDING KING guitars
Vintage 1930’s brand reborn and brought up to date with modern manufacturing techniques but designs that focus on the 1930’s heritage. Great value folk instruments all with a real sense of ‘Americana’ – Parlour, 000 and Dreadnaught guitars, mandolins, resonators, banjos and lapsteels all at keen price points.
HIPSTRAP straps
With such awesome guitars available it made sense to get something equally desirable to hang them from – enter Hipstrap, 100% handmade to order in Buenos Aires Argentina.Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
A shame Recording King really cut back their catalogue, there were some interesting models like the 13 fret model, the 12 fret 000's and a few others including the Nick Lucas one in particular.
I opted for one of these mainly because Fender tele neck's string spacing is too close to the neck edges for me. I tend to push E and e strings off the fingerboard. The Fujigen models give a little more fingerboard real estate.
I bought it 'used' earlier this year and posted pics here (& elsewhere) at that time. It needed fret leveling to make it play at its best. Other than that I have replaced only one part; the string-T, with a Tusq one.
The tuners are reported to be Gotoh (according to the seller). They look like them, and more importantly hold tuning every bit as well as the Grovers, PRS locking, and various Schallers equipped guitars I have.
Pickups sound classic to my ears. I have no intention of changing them. The neck shape has become my favourite. It feels like a kind of compound shape with modest V at the neck ending with a flat D at the heel join (C shape in the middle). Its very comfortable.
It has my favourite 'voice' at present. It was formerly my Ric 650 and Fingerbone (uk custom build) Strat with BKs.
So I like the Fujigen v much indeed.
This is it (with original string-t)
I would certainly like to try one of the Fujigen Strat builds in future.
The strat style FGNs (Odessey) and the Tele style (Iliad) are all awesome. I could get some demo models to a local dealer to you if you wanted to check them out, just let me know where.
If you could get some down to Wildwire in Selby that would be nifty.
Cool, I'll hit them up and see if we can do anything.
It was a lovely guitar which I loved - unfortunately within a few weeks the bridge started to lift.
I contacted them and sadly they didn’t have a replacement, so they refunded me.
Are they still selling direct online?
previously 'retsacotarts' on music radar forum
Superb guitar.
Here's a video where I upgraded the pickups to fishman fluence.
https://www.instagram.com/insta.guitarstuff/
Had it for about 8 years now, nothing ever went wrong with it.
Those FGNs sound interesting too, like the look of the Tele above
previously 'retsacotarts' on music radar forum
I just had a glance at the Fujigen website. Models numbers differ from the few (older?) that appear elsewhere.
From FGN, I like the semis. Ie: MSA-HP (and MSA-HP-C) and MFA FP.
I live in Portsmouth area. Nearest dealer is PMT Farlington