Since its 1952 inception, Guild Guitars have been made in several key, East Coast cities: New York, Westerley Rhode Island, and Hoboken New Jersey. It’s the company’s electric models from the 1950s and 1960s—manufactured primarily in a factory on Newark Street in Hoboken—that has inspired Guild’s new line of reissues of those great guitars, appropriately dubbed the Newark St. Collection.
That collection includes this Guild X-175 Manhattan, which stays faithfull to the specifications of its 1950s-era original. From jazz to blues to rockabilly and beyond, the diverse X-175 offered great warmth when its single-coil neck pickup was engaged, and cutting treble and bite when using its bridge pickup. The guitar, then and now, is constructed using a laminated spruce top with laminated maple back and sides. The neck is three-piece mahogany/maple/mahogany. All of these features coalesce into a great looking, sounding, feeling instrument.