Guild's first solid body guitar designs in the 1960s were fascinating and original instruments. Unfortunately the public didn't buy them sufficiently, and by the seventies Guild were making very similar instruments to rivals Gibson. The JS-1 and JS-2 basses took heavily from the Gibson EB0 and EB3, in look, parts, finish and construction
In the latter half of the seventies the SG shape was beginning to look old, and the fuller humbucker bass sound less desirable too. Guild came out with an original, innovative, and economic design. Stylistically, a mix of Fender and Rickenbacker with the set-neck mahogany build of a Gibson. And at the same time its also very much itself. The new single coil pickups and controls were mounted on the scratchplate allowing them to be preassembled before attaching to the body. New for Guild, but a technique employed by Fender from the beginning, and used increasingly ever since the the globalistaion of guitar manufacture in the late 60s and 70s.
The Guild B-302 was the two pickup version of the B-301 bass, and companion model to the S-300 guitar. The all mahogany B-302 first appeared on Guild price lists in late 1976, with the ash and maple version appearing in just under a year later.
The 1978 Guild electrics catalogue dedicates one internal page and the back cover to the B-301 and B-302
The B-301 was the first in Guild's new generation of solid body guitars and basses - so sucessful, we followed it with our double pick-up B-302.
Both have the long 34" (86.4cm) scale, wide frets and curved fingerboard that rock bassists are using. Plus a new bass pick-up. And a new solid brass bridge/tailpiece that gives you perfect intonation.
The new pickups were single coil units in black covers with two pole pieces per string. The B-300s were the first models to use them, but they appeared on numerous newer Guild basses (Guild X-701 and X-702,
Guild SB-202 and the
Guild SB-203 ) which replaced them in the early 1980s
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