History

1959 saw Takamine make its start as a humble music instrument workshop at the foot of Mt. Takamine in Gifu, Central Japan, which was then known for its wood craft industry. With the booming folk music in late 60's, acoustic guitars were rapidly gaining popularity among Japanese youth and, as a result, increased the competition and quality amongst Japanese luthiers. The basis for Takamine's success was formed in these years.

Mr Mass Hirade, who joined the company in 1968, made a great contributions to the design and quality of Takamine instruments. In fact, his contributions are still honoured to this day with a range of the "Classical" family models still carrying the "Hirade" name.

In the mid ‘70’s, Mr. Hirade assumed the presidency of Takamine, and immediately set about increasing the world distribution of the Takamine brand by forming a relationship with Kaman Music Corporation in the USA.

Around the same time that Mr Hirade took over as President, the size of concert venues was getting larger, and professional guitarists were struggling to have their acoustic guitars heard above everything else on stage. Starting from attaching a microphone to their guitars, they tried magnetic pickups and then contact pickups, but the sound quality was far from acceptable.

Takamine entered full-scale development of an electro-acoustic guitar in the late 1970s with their engineers being allowed to pursue their own ideal sound without being bound by the traditional rules of guitar-making and, as a result, invented several key components, one of which was its proprietary ‘Palathetic pickup’. This unique and innovative device integrates transducers and the guitar bridge in a way which minimizes feedback and between-strings crosstalk, successfully setting the industry standard of today's electro-acoustic guitar. The first commercial model of Takamine electro-acoustic guitar with this Palathetic pickup was completed in 1978.

In April 1979, Takamine launched its first electro-acoustic guitar in overseas markets and it was not long before renowned American musicians including Ry Coodar, Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne came on stage with their own Takamine. In fact, the Eagles' Glenn Frey used a Takamine 12-string electro-acoustic for the intro of the famous "Hotel California" track, and the brand
name “Takamine” quickly became known all over the music world.

Always striving to be ahead of the industry, 1988 saw Takamine release their first single unit preamp, which realized interchangeable preamps by integrating preamp and battery case in one housing unit, and also by unifying the top panel size. This proved a boon as technology developed, as the player could keep their prized guitar, and update the preamp if required.

Meanwhile, Takamine was also developing the two-way truss rod jointly with G-GOTOH. This innovation added to the already superior stability of the Takamine instrument – further reassurance for the player that, when they got on stage or stepped into the studio, their instrument would play exactly as it did last time they played it.

As if 1988 wasn’t productive enough, Takamine also released the DSP, the world's first on-board full digital preamp, which received strong support from many professional guitar players around the world.

2004 saw the introduction of the Cooltube preamp (CTP-1) - a preamp which utilises an ECC82 vacuum tube running at low voltage in order to impart a supremely warm, natural sound which is rich in harmonics.