Schecter Guitar Research

Schecter Guitar Research, or commonly known as just Schecter, is an American guitar manufacturer. The company was founded in 1976 by David Schecter and originally only produced replacement parts for existing guitars from manufacturers such as Fender and Gibson. Today, the company mass-produces its own line of electric guitars, bass guitars, and steel-string acoustic guitars.

Custom shop days, 1976 – 1983

In 1976, David Schecter opened Schecter Guitar Research, a repair shop in Van Nuys, California. The modest repair shop manufactured replacement guitar necks and bodies, complete pickup assemblies, bridges, pickguards, tuners, knobs, potentiometers, and other miscellaneous guitar parts. Eventually, Schecter Guitar Research offered every part needed to build a complete guitar. It supplied parts to big guitar manufacturers such as Fender and Gibson and to custom repair shops which were building complete guitars out of Schecter parts. By the late 1970s, Schecter offered more than 400 guitar parts, but did not offer any finished instruments.

In 1979, Schecter offered for the first time its own fully-assembled electric guitars. These guitars were custom shop models based on Fender designs. They were of very high quality, very expensive, and were sold only by twenty retailers across the United States.

In September of 1979, Alan Rogan, the guitar tech at the time, for Pete Townshend of The Who, picked up a custom shop Schecter guitar. It was a Fender Telecaster-style guitar with two humbucking pickups and a Gibson Les Paul-style pickup selector. Pete Townshend immediately fell in love with it, and it became his main stage guitar. He later had several similar instruments built from Schecter parts and assembled by Schecter and U.K. based guitar maker Roger Giffin. Pete Townshend continued to use those Schecter guitars until just after The Who's 1985 appearance at Live Aid.

In 1980, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits used Schecter Stratocaster-style guitars to record the band's third album, Making Movies. Mark Knopfler owned many Schecter guitars. In 2004 one of his Schecters, Stratocaster-style guitar with a tobacco sunburst finish, was sold at an auction for over $50,000, the highest amount ever paid for a Schecter guitar.

info : wikipedia