Does anybody know what bass this is?

[Bassassin]

9 hours ago, adrihongkong said:

@Bassassin, in the same link I sent earlier in which Hoshino is mentioned it says that "Matao guitars were manufactured at several factories over the years, including the Hoshino factory, and the Matsumoku factory for a time". Is that information not correct?

I've no idea whether they ever sourced from Matsumoku, but we can see from the details that these basses are not Matsumoku products. It is incorrect to suggest they were made by Hoshino, as these are mid/late 70s basses, and Hoshino's Tama factory only made guitars for a short period in the mid 1960s.

(I should point out that all of the "copy era" instruments are 1970s. There were no accurate Japanese copies of American instruments made in the 60s wth the exception of the very first Les Paul clone, which sneaked onto the market in 1969. Difficult to be clear about dates but Fujigen & Matsumoku LP copies first appear in 1971 catalogues, along with Strats, Teles, Precisions, SGs, Jazz basses etc - so it's realistic to pin the start of mass manufacture to 1970.)

However, the Mataos may well have been sourced via Hoshino, acting as a distributor for whichever factory manufactured them, I think that's a reasonably possible hypothesis.

Ta for the additional pics, I think it's quite likely both of those basses are from the same factory again. The black Precision is sort-of what I'd expect from a post '76 export bass; accurate copy bar the headstock - which is exactly what you find with Cimars & CSLs from 1980-ish. This is my 1980 CSL Jazz copy:

It's not particularly original - I've pimped it a bit but originally it had a standard bridge, round-end pickups like yours & a 3-pot control plate. It also has the same 3-screw, cast-body, torque-adjustable tuners - and I'm sure it's from the same mystery factory as all of these others. Basses identical to mine were also sold branded Cimar.

I also have this, which is a Cimar. It has the same headstock, tuners and heel-adust truss rod as my Jazz:

Both of these basses have a lower-half stamped neckplate, like yours & all the others. Yours only differs in having a serial which I think was hand-stamped post-manufacture.

The hardware's interesting but represents another gap in the hive-mind knowledge thus far - if we knew who made some of the parts, it might be easier to tie things together. It's (unfortunately) no help at all, but part of the intrigue, that these 3-screw tuners are a variation of the units fitted to 70s & 80s Yamahas, which are identical (and interchangeable) apart from the style of the key:

And that headstock shape looks a bit familiar... Really that's probably a coincidence, but the confusion here isn't mitigated by knowing that Yamaha outsourced manufacture to a variety of factories, and not knowing which factories those were.

So in short, my thoughts are as follows: Mataos come from the same factory as your Diamond (but not necessarily other Diamonds) and the similarities between them and Cimar/CSL suggests those too are from the same factory and since Cimar & CSL are brands known to be connected to Hoshino then there's a circumstantial possibility that Matao was also sourced via Hoshino in their role as distributor which is a role we know they undertook because UK importer J.T. Coppock Ltd sourced their Antoria guitars (which were functionally identical to Ibanez) via Hoshino and those were sold alongside the identical Ibanez instruments at a significantly lower price point which we know through the personal testimony of sales reps at the time who used the same demo instruments to sell two different brands to two separate dealer networks and, and, and...

Hope that's clear!

Congratulations! That concludes Phase 1 module 46.3(b) of your induction into the Vintage Japanese Guitar Community. Your badge will be in the post, pending submission of the correct remuneration and completion of a short (92 page) written test.

[adrihongkong]

Thank you very much for all this. I love your CSL!

I am going to keep digging and see if I can figure out who manufactured those parts. If I did, would you accept that as a form of payment? 😉

[Bassassin]

9 hours ago, adrihongkong said:

Thank you very much for all this. I love your CSL!

I am going to keep digging and see if I can figure out who manufactured those parts. If I did, would you accept that as a form of payment? 😉

Definitely - the more shoulders to the wheel the better!

Parts are a can of worms, fortunately for the moment it's a pretty small can, I think for the 70s/80s era stuff we can point to maybe 3 manufacturers & that's it. Top of the heap is Gotoh, because they're still around & still manufacture a lot of the same stuff, they're fairly easy to ID.

Chushin was known as a hardware manufacturer before they were recognised as the large-scale manufacturer they were, mostly because bridges on some MIJ Washburn basses have a big Chushin logo underneath. That was, of course before it was appreciated they actually made the whole thing - which of course gives rise to speculation that the parts were made for them, not by them.

Third is Shinetsu Byora, apparently still trading although I can't find anything beyond fairly vague business lists for Nagano prefecture. I'd say it's probable, since the Japanese guitar industry these days is small & largely high-end, that if they are still around, they're more likely to manufacture general metal hardware rather than specific musical instrument parts.

Like I said, can of worms - if you can find any other parts manufacturers, then I'm sure legendary status within the MIJ community awaits!

 

Just had a thought since this thread's gone off on various tangents, should I start a general "Who made my MIJ bass?" thread? Might be fun. Or start a fight. Or both...

[bassaussie]

Bassassin, you mentioned the tuners and their similarity to Yamaha units of the time, which I'd noticed myself. I assumed you'd get to that at some point, so left it to you to bring up.

However ....... now that you've posted that photo of your Cimar (which is incredible, as I've never seen that model before), it raises a question for me. Have you ever thought that the body shape of your Cimar has this vague Yamaha-ish quality to it? Maybe it's the angle, but it has this plumpness to it in the body that reminds of of the BB shape.

As for your other posts - amazing as usual.

[bassaussie]

27 minutes ago, Bassassin said:

Just had a thought since this thread's gone off on various tangents, should I start a general "Who made my MIJ bass?" thread? Might be fun. Or start a fight. Or both...

That would be amazing, but has the potential of having enough information to fill an entire forum all on it's own.

[Bassassin]

4 hours ago, bassaussie said:

However ....... now that you've posted that photo of your Cimar (which is incredible, as I've never seen that model before), it raises a question for me. Have you ever thought that the body shape of your Cimar has this vague Yamaha-ish quality to it? Maybe it's the angle, but it has this plumpness to it in the body that reminds of of the BB shape.

My Cimar's an XR series 2065, according to this 1979-ish catalogue:

I've only ever seen a couple of others, they do seem pretty scarce. Mine's ever-so-slightly modded by necessity - when I got it, it had been sprayed black & fitted with a white P-bass pickguard. Replaced the guard with a tort to make it closer to original, but if you look closely you can see the stock guard's a slightly different shape with sharper corner angles. Wired mine V/T V/T with stacked pots, as I really don't like selector switches on basses where there's no way of blending pickups.

Never saw it as being too similar to the Yam BBs, just struck me as an attempt to get away a bit from the identikit Fender shape - a bit like the Ibanez Blazer, to which these are related. It's also slightly offset, which isn't obvious from my pic, so it's somewhere mid-morph between a P & a J.

There's an interesting page from a Geman site about Cimar basses, some good pics comparing the changes & evolutions in design. I've taken the liberty of linking through Google translate, which occasionally leads to the creation of some bizarre new idioms:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guitar-letter.de%2FKnowledge%2FHistory%2FDieGeschichteDesJazzBassBeiCimar.htm

Some interesting comparisons with the parallel Ibanez models too, although he curiously omits to mention the Cimar Stinger/Ibanez Blazer paradox - wherein both instruments are exactly the same:

I've actually got one of these Mk1 Blazers in bits, body needs a refin. Will do it one day...

 

 

Edited June 22, 2020 by Bassassin

[donniebrasco]

On 16/06/2020 at 09:18, Bassassin said:

To be blunt, yes. I honestly have no idea why someone who claims to understand these instruments would say yours was made by Matsumoku. The only reason I can think of is that he is conflating the standalone Diamond brand with Aria Diamond, and then presuming that every Aria guitar was made by Matsumoku, which is demonstably not correct.

If you'll bear with me I'll try to explain - it's difficult to do without being longwinded so this might be both boring and overly detailed. Brevity is not my forte (that's probably a prog rock thing!) but I'll try to make sense. I should explain that while I might only be some nobody on a forum, I'm some nobody on a forum who's been playing MIJ instruments for 40+ years, studying them for much of that time, and for years made much of my living restoring and selling them. I have owned, played, worked on, assessed and sold multiple hundreds of these things and along the way picked up a bit of info.

My MIJ rule of thumb no.1 is, with a couple of exceptions, ignore the sticker on the end, if there is one. Most brand names have absolutely nothing to do with the manufacturer, and can be more often misleading rather than helpful. So, taking your bass as just a Japanese bass, I'll try to explain how I, and anyone else who knows these instruments, can tell that it's not a Matsumoku product. Many manufacturers had various individual traits which can make it straightforward to ID their instruments, or, like I said earlier, to be confident about what something definitely isn't!

First - the neckplate. On their 70s era copies Matsumoku used two styles of plate:

Both styles are exclusive to Matsumoku - a "Steel Adjustable" plate constitutes a 100% confirmed ID. The only Mats instruments that did not always use these styles were brands commissioned by specific distributors, for example Univox & SLM Electra, who specified their own logos and serialisation.

The plate on your bass, with its lower-half MIJ stamp is a standard style mostly associated with Fujigen Gakki but also used occasionally by several other manufacturers including Kasuga and Moridaira. Importantly, this style has never been seen on a Matsumoku instrument. If you read the quoted section in one of my earlier posts, that gives a bit of insight into how metal parts such as neckplates were sourced by various different builders.

I didn't talk about the serial on your bass earlier - as an aside, it's interesting (I have never seen that format or positioning before) but I think a red herring as far as a manufacturer ID is concerned. Looking at the irregularity of the characters compared to other serials, it appears to have been hand-stamped after the plate was manufactured.

The pickups on your bass help to exclude Matsumoku as manufacturer. On their J bass copies, Mats used a couple of distinct styles which are quite different to standard J units:

As the 70s copies were based on 60s & 70s Fenders, pickups were intended to be hidden under chrome covers, so authenticity wasn't considered that important. The earliest copies pre-date the existence of accurate J type pickups, so often manufacturers used whatever was available - it's  common to find chrome Telecaster-style units under the covers of budget basses.

Anyway, as time passed, the basses became more authentic & Matsumoku moved to using conventional J-type pickups, interchangeable with the original Fender units. The round-ended pickups like yours are common but broadly, not used by Matsumoku or Fujigen.

Identification of electronics & pickups remains one of the big grey areas in the MIJ community knowledge - Nisshin Onpa was responsible for Maxon pickups which were very widely used, and very helpful in dating pre-serial instruments as from 1971 they bear a code which defines the unit's actual day of manufacture. However there are various pickup styles, including most bass pickups, which aren't coded or branded, so beyond the overall style not much use for date or ID.

I need to explain how I know your bass is not early 70s. Simply, it's the headstock. Accurate MIJ copies of American designs started appearing around 1970 - bodies, headstocks, fretboards, the whole aesthetic, was intended to look as convincing as possible. It's entirely fair to say that no MIJ Fender copy made before mid-1977 would have a headstock like yours.

You'll have heard the term "lawsuit" bandied about in relation to these instruments. Leaving aside the fact there never was a lawsuit, the threatened legal action by Norlin, Gibson's then-parent company against Elger Hoshino, the US arm of Ibanez brand owner Hoshino Gakki Ten, was in relation to Hoshino's use of the trademarked "open book" shape on Ibanez-branded guitars. No lawsuit took place because Ibanez had stopped using that style over a year earlier, as the brand started moving away from copy instruments towards its own designs.

However a consequence of the stir caused by the legal threat was that it precipitated a general move away from copies, and other Japanese manufacturers followed suit, meaning most headstock shapes on exported instruments were modified from that point on. Matsumoku changed their Fender copies to this shape:

It's worth mentioning that Japanese home-market copies weren't modified, and while by 1979 MIJ copies in general had pretty much vanished from export ranges, they continued in their home market for decades.

As I said in my first post, I've never seen a bass the same as yours before, and while not getting a pat answer about its ID & manufacture might be frustrating, for the likes of me it's intensely fascinating. I think most of the MIJ intelligentsia elsewhere will probably conclude it's a Chushin - and they might be right - but I'm not sure. Chushin Gakki was a massive manufacturer which supplied an immense range of instruments of all levels with a countless number of brands - but their scale & significance is something that's only become obvious in the last 10 or so years. It's meant the name's become something of a catch-all for anything we can't be certain about, and realistically, that's a lot of stuff.

I'm skeptical broadly because there are lots of examples of confirmed Chushin Jazz copies which are the same standard as yours but have very different woodwork details. It makes no sense that the same factory would produce two different versions with the same appearance, spec and price point. This is part of the same logic that can be used to tentatively rule out other manufacturers whose instruments are well-recorded such as Fujigen, Moridaira, Kasuga.

I think your bass - and the related Cimars & CSLs - came from a specific factory whose traits we're as yet unsure about and whose role at the time isn't clear. The likes of Terada, Iida, Dyna, Kawai, Nagoya Suzuki & Kiso Suzuki were all active at the time and certainly on the copy bandwagon, along with numerous long-forgotten others, and of course Matsumoto Gakki Seizou Kumiai, the manufacturers' union mentioned in an earlier post, about which we still understand frustratingly little.

I've often compared understanding these instruments to a form of archaeology - there is little information about the hundreds of manufacturers that came and went during the Japanese guitar boom, a period that broadly spanned the late 50s to the late 80s, and the ones we know most about are those that were most successful at the time, and that survive today. Everything else is the result of years of piecing together scraps of what's left behind.

 

What an immensely great post and interesting reading @Bassassin !!!! It's such a pleasure to start this morning with a hot coffee and this reading, thanks a million!!!!

[martisanma]

Hello everyone. I just bought this bass and I'm trying to identify the brand. I ended up here because of the similarity of the headstock shape. 

Can anyone guess which can be the original brand? I still don't have it in my hands. We'll see if in the neck there is a clue. 

[Bassassin]

Apart from the fretboard material it appears to be the same bass as the OP's - obviously at the very opposite extreme of condition, but it seems to have all the same build details and hardware, so it's logical to assume it's from the same manufacturer. If you've read through the thread (and I hope you have!) then you'll know it's not at all clear who that was, and unfortunately I have nothing new to add to what was discussed upthread.

 

As far as "brand" is concerned,it could be anything - or indeed nothing, as unbranded instruments were very common. With instruments from this era, more often than not the name on the end, if there is one, tells us little or nothing, which is why trying to discern an actual manufacturer is of more interest.

[LeftyJ]

Well, it clearly states Fender on the headstock, so I'd say "SOLVED!" 

 

I'm sure @Bassassin will be in shortly. 

 

Edit: He's ahead of me even!

[Pinetop Jackson]

I stumbled upon this thread doing some research on Matao guitars. 

Man what a wonderful & fascinating read!  @Bassassinyou likened the pursuit to archaeology, and that's it exactly... Guitarchaeology!  

(I thought I invented that term about 4 years ago, but then I found it had been used earlier by someone's Reverb shop)