Antoria model 994 from 1963

guitarz.blogspot.com:
This Antoria guitar, recently sold on eBay, is an early example from the 1960s. It is a Japanese guitar from just before the era of "copy guitars" and lawsuits, Fender and Gibson getting very worried, etc, etc. In fact, it's not often you'll see a vintage example of an original Antoria design as they are better known for their replicas. Note the really thin body which would have had very minimal routing inside; the pickups are basically sitting on top of the pickguard.

Another nice touch is the matching coloured pickup selector switches - that's one way of being sure that the baby blue guitar finish is original!

G L Wilson

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1960s Vintage Italian Bigson bass

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Here's yet another product of the 1960s Beat Boom during which the public simply couldn't get enough guitars and European instrument manufacturers switched from producing accordions and leapt onto the guitar bandwagon.

This short-scale Bigson bass is vaguely reminiscent of the Eko Rokes model and was also produced in Italy at around the same time. It's possible that it was also made by Eko despite the brandname that appears on the headstock.

Speaking of which, I can't help wondering if the "Bigson" was a deliberate anagram of Gibson.

G L Wilson

NB: Please make sure you are reading this Guitarz post at guitarz.blogspot.com and not on a Scraper blog that copies posts without permission (and steals bandwidth) so as to profit from advertising. Please support original bloggers!