Zemaitis

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Tony Zemaitis (1935 - August 17, 2002) was a famous guitar luthier from England.

He is mostly known for his “metal top” electric guitars, made famous by players like Keith Richards and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Eric Clapton.^{[citation needed]}

Since his retirement in 2000, original Zemaitis guitars have become highly collectable and demand very high prices.^{[citation needed]} After his passing in 2002, the Zemaitis family continued the guitar building business from Japan, offering both high-end hand-built guitars, and a more affordable “Greco Zemaitis” line of guitars. The current production is based on original drawings of Tony Zemaitis.

1 Early years
2 1970s: fame
3 1980s
4 1990s
5 Owners

[edit] Early years

Tony Zemaitis was born in 1935 and left school at the age of sixteen to help out with family finances. He took up a five-year apprenticeship as a Cabinet Maker but it was only when he found an old damaged guitar in his family attic that Tony found his real passion in life. In 1957 after completing his national service this hobby expanded with Tony producing a few basic guitars to learn about construction, soundhole shapes, tonewood and string length. He experimented with differing multi-stringed instruments with some of these models making their way onto the folk scene. In 1960 he began selling his guitars at a price to cover the materials he used and soon realized that musicians needed instruments that were simple and light. By 1961, after being mentioned in the music press, Tony started to be approached by leading players who wanted to use his guitars.

[edit] 1970s: fame

In 1970 Tony Zemaitis started experimenting with placing a metal shield on the top of the guitar in order to eliminate microphonic noise picked up by the guitars’ pickups. His first metal top guitar was built for Tony McPhee, and the second ever built for Ron Wood of the Faces. Wood played the instrument on the Faces Top of The Pops appearance in 1971, and the shiny appearance of the guitar raised an incredible amount of interest from guitar players. Tony Zemaitis asked gun engraver Danny O’Brien to do artistic engravings on the metal top and other metal parts, and started building custom-order guitars for the rich and famous. His most famous guitars are Ron Wood’s 24-fret metal top guitars (a total of 4 guitars were build for Wood), which he used from 1971 until 1995, Ron Wood’s “Desert Island” (or “Slide on This”) metal disc top guitar, Keith Richards’ 5-string “Skull&Bones” guitar, Eric Clapton’s “Ivan the Terrible” 12-string acoustic guitar and The Faces’ Ronnie Lane’s basses. Aside from metal top guitars, from the mid-70’s Tony Zemaitis also started decorating the tops of his guitars with elaborate pearl inlay, either figures like dragons and skulls and bones, or complete mosaic-like inlaid tops. These guitars commend the highest prices.

[edit] 1980s

In the 1980’s Zemaitis launched a “Student model” guitar that would allow people to upgrade his guitar when it was affordable but this proved too popular and time consuming. Tony quickly realized that this model threatened to overshadow all other guitar production so it was discontinued. The 1980’s were also a time when Tony started to take more orders for guitars than it was physically possible to produce and he had to start turning down work.

[edit] 1990s

The 1990’s have seen a massive increase in the collectability of Tony’s guitars and also the appearance of forgeries. These fakes and outright forgeries in "new" and "second hand" guise at first glance may look genuine but they will not sound like a true Zemaitis due to the use of second-rate materials. During his 39 years of production, Tony had a policy of never making any two guitars the same, while at the same time limiting himself to the production of only ten guitars a year to ensure the quality of each individual model.

Zemaitis guitars are world renowned as handcrafted, precision instruments of the highest quality. Some models are highly collectable and sought after and have a particularly high price tag.