St. George MP-2 12-String Electric Guitar w/Gig Bag (Early 1960's)

St. George MP-2 12-String Electric Guitar w/Gig Bag (Early 1960's)This guitar is in very good condition for its age, with some dings and cosmetic wear. All parts look to be original except for the knobs and one tuner gear that was replaced in store by our guitar techs. All electronics are working well with no issues. Originally, these guitars had a removable bridge cover; the cover is not included with this guitar, and the original blue finish can still be seen where the cover was over the body. The original bottom

This guitar is in very good condition for its age, with some dings and cosmetic wear. All parts look to be original except for the knobs and one tuner gear that was replaced in store by our guitar techs. All electronics are working well with no issues. Originally, these guitars had a removable bridge cover; the cover is not included with this guitar, and the original blue finish can still be seen where the cover was over the body. The original bottom-loading gig bag is included with one of the two zippers being broken. The guitar has been fully set up and has been strung with D'Addario EXL150 strings. The frets have decent life left and are a narrow and tall vintage fret. This guitar also has a non-standard scale length of 23.5“. The combination of the neck shape, frets, and scale length makes for a very comfortable playing 12-string.

St. George guitars were named after Anthony George, who was the proprietor of several music stores in the state of New York. Anthony George was in Japan looking to start importing guitars into the USA. He ended up touring the Fujigen Gakki factory and, after deciding to partner with them, stayed in Japan for several months, helping design the first guitars exported to the USA by Fujigen.

From our research, we believe this to be from the early 1960s based on the shield and crest St. George logo. Some later St. George guitars were manufactured by Teisco Co. LTD as well as Shinko Gakki but had different logo and headstock designs. The pickups also look to be very early Maxon single-coil pickups, which also points to this being a Fujigen-built guitar.

These early 12-string St. George guitars are fairly rare, with the 6-string versions being more common. In general, the early Fujigen ones are the rarest and most collectible of the St. George range of instruments.

Note: A lot of the information regarding this brand was found with various online resources, but we also used the book History of Japanese Electric Guitar by Frank Meyers, which is a great resource for the history of 1960s Japanese-made guitars.