Over in Leeds, UK, Dennis Drumm believes Vintage Guitars has found the ultimate “sweet spot” in the guitar market. The brand’s intersection of price point, quality, and flair was their goal from the start back in 1995, but as the JHS brand has evolved over 25 years, Drumm becomes more and more confident that he and his team have not only nailed it, but also birthed a long reign of lifelong “keeper” guitars.
“I’ve stood on enough NAMM show booths over the lifetime of the Vintage brand to know from players, reactions, dealers, and musicians, that we have hit the sweet spot,” Drumm, JHS managing director, tells MMR proudly.
The brainchild of John Hornby Skewes & Co. Ltd. (JHS) was born in 1995, following fellow JHS creation of Encore guitars. After multiple successful lines in the Encore family, the Encore Vintage VC1 Series served as the jumping off point to launch Vintage Guitars in the mid-90s.
The Encore Vintage VC1 Series aimed to make room for a new kind of guitar: one that offered an attractive price point, coupled with an overall untouchable mark of quality for a vintage-looking guitar that wasn’t actually old or used. Because, as Drumm notes, for years the only way to purchase a guitar that looked vintage was, well, to purchase a true “vintage” guitar.
“The Encore Vintage VC1 Series with a 1995 price point of £199, with alder bodies, Indian rosewood boards, Grover 135 vintage tuners, Lace Sensor pickups and the Wilkinson VS10 vibrato bridge, was a real ‘myth buster,” Drumm says. “It was a ‘bubble burster’, a poke in the eye for the 1995 £599 USA wonder guitar. You could take Encore Vintage VC1 guitars to any gig, from the local club to the biggest auditorium in the world and they’d absolutely do the job and again, with a price tag of just £199. I know for a fact that folks are still playing these today in 2020 as long-term ‘keepers’.”
From there, Vintage Guitars branched off from its older sibling and started forging its own path to accessibility, laying the groundwork for Vintage guitars to make their way into roughly 150 markets worldwide. (To this day, both the Encore and Vintage coexist happily under the JHS family roof, along with myriad other names like Fret King, GraphTech Guitar Labs, and Wilkinson).
“The biggest challenge was being a brand-new small dog in a very big park, fighting to get attention, which we’ve done by a variety of methods, some commonplace, some challenging, some expensive and some painful, but mostly fun,” Drumm reflects.
Some of the brand’s greatest highlights rest not in awards or financial achievements (although Vintage has plenty of those, too), but in their products and collaborations. Much of what Drumm mentions ties in the guitar hardware and electronics expertise of Trev Wilkinson, who boasts over 50 years of experience in guitar design, construction, and manufacturing. His ties with JHS and Vintage Guitars also date back to 1995.
“Some of the milestones in guitars will have been the V100 ‘Lemon Drop,’ which brought together what has turned out to be a real classic combination of features that has seen the model played by a legion of fans in a massive variety of contexts,” Drumm explains. “Our relationship with German guitarist Thomas Blug gave Trev Wilkinson and I a fantastic opportunity to show what we could create within the Vintage brand when we created Thomas’ signature Vintage instruments. To produce a serial production, relatively modestly priced electric guitar which a player of that stature will seamlessly swop with his incredibly precious and collectible personal ’61 closet classic, worth who knows what, is an achievement which benchmarks what Vintage is all about.”
Additionally, when Vintage found itself nearing its 10-year anniversary in the early aughts, the brand introduced the Vintage ReIssued series, a clear demonstration of Vintage one-upping themselves and their values surrounding guitar-building and innovation.
“When we launched Vintage ReIssued back in 2004, Trev and I were determined to set new benchmarks for the price point Vintage inhabits and prove that it was possible to produce instruments which were far more than the sum of their parts, which a young player would be super happy with, but which also, his or her teacher would happily play, or even serious players could genuinely take on the biggest stages in the world and perform with,” he notes. “They all needed to be ‘keepers’ – it was about building in a specification and level of quality at a price, rather than compromising the product by building down to a price.”
“I think consumers are making decisions much less based upon what it says on the headstock of a guitar and far more how an individual instrument suits their need of the moment,” Drumm adds.
“That’s where Vintage wins. It should be a relatively straightforward task to make a great ‘closet Classic repro’ guitar for $5000 and there’s a lot of brands doing it well. However, even the most well-informed consumer likes a bargain and Vintage has capitalized on that simple fact by producing a whole range of electric guitars across many styles, with prices more akin to the $500 region.”
The company’s most recent releases honor their 25-year milestone through a trio of re-releases, all complete with a silver burst finish: the V6H, V75, and V100. Also new is the brand’s Pro Shop, which allows customers to create and order guitars custom-built for themselves and allows Texas-based guitar techs to “showcase their talents with unique custom pieces and create one offs to order,” as Drumm explains.
Just days before this article goes to print, Vintage added a four-string electro-acoustic bass guitar to the Paul Brett Statesboro’ Series. Remarkably, its cost is £199 – the same 1995 pricepoint of the Encore Vintage VC1 Series. Because at Vintage Guitars, Drumm’s adage of “quality is consistency” is more than just a catchy slogan – it’s truly their way of doing business.
“25 years of hard work and some heartache have paid off, as the brand has amazing visibility, folks ‘get it,’ understand that it does what it says on the tin, trust it, and by and large, from distributor to retailer to consumer, enjoy what the brand brings them,” Drumm concludes.
