Guitar serial number dating
Ninety-one makers, each at the confidence its sources actually support — Taylor down to the day, Ibanez to the month, Gibson from their own published scheme, and Rickenbacker handed straight back to Rickenbacker. Where a serial could be several things, you get all of them. Where the table belonged to somebody who has not been asked, you get the reason instead — Martin, Fender, Ovation and Tokai are among those, and each says who to read it from.
This one runs on your own device. It is worked out in your browser, so there is nothing to send and nothing to log. Where a tool on this site does send something out, that page says so and names where it goes.
Martin: the one that genuinely works, and is not here
Martin has run a single sequential series since 1898 and kept the records. Its published table gives the last serial number issued in each year, so any serial falls in exactly one year — no overlap, no guessing. It is the best dating scheme on this page by a distance.
And the table is not here. It used to be: 128 consecutive years, read from martinguitar.com. Martin’s terms forbid reproducing it, and this site asks before it publishes rather than publishing and waiting to be told. A letter is outstanding. Until it is answered the table stays out, and the tool above says so instead of producing a year.
That is a real loss and worth stating plainly rather than burying. For Martin this page now tells you what the scheme is and sends you to Martin’s own lookup to apply it. If they say yes it comes back the same day — the extraction tool still exists and the table is still on disk, withheld rather than discarded.
Martin publishes separate tables for Little Martin, Backpacker, mandolins and the ukulele lines. Those were never here either, and the same letter covers them.
Fender: three countries, and the letters collide
Fender did not use one sequence. Numbers were applied from bins of pre-made parts, so prefixes recur across years and the ranges overlap. Fender’s own article says it: “Notice that there is quite a bit of overlap.”
Fender’s terms were never read. Their support site returns 403 to anything automated, including the terms page itself, so there is no answer either way — and an unread restriction is no more a permission than an absent one. A letter is outstanding.
Unlike every other withdrawal here, no rule outlives the rows.
Tokai kept its two-digit-year rule because that is arithmetic you do on the number in
front of you. Fender’s scheme is the prefix table; there is nothing
underneath it to keep. That takes Squier with it, which was only datable through the
JV and SQ series in the Japanese article.
Fender publish the charts themselves, in support articles for US-made, Mexican-made and Japanese-made instruments. Search their support site for your prefix and you have the answer in one step. The rules are withheld rather than deleted here, and come back the day the answer is yes.
What is worth saying about those charts, and stays because it is this page’s reading of them rather than the charts themselves: most prefixes span several years, and the same letters appear in different countries’ charts, so one serial can match the US chart and the Japanese one. Nothing in the number says which factory. The country printed on the headstock does, and that is where to look first whichever chart you end up reading.
Length is part of the rule in Japan rather than decoration — the same letter with five digits and with six means different years — which is the kind of detail a decoder gets right and a glance at a chart does not.
Not covered: Korean, Indonesian and Chinese Fenders, whose schemes Fender do not publish the same way; and pre-1976 US instruments, which used plain numbers with ranges that overlap too heavily to be worth guessing at. Fender also state their acoustic serials were never archived and cannot date an instrument at all — their answer, not an omission here.
Gibson: the maker’s own page, and the era it leaves out
An earlier version of this page said Gibson publish no serial number table. That was wrong, and it is worth correcting in public rather than quietly. Gibson publish a detailed scheme on their own Help Centre — eight formats for Gibson USA, the Custom Shop reissue codes, and the ranking numbers that say which factory built the instrument. Everything in the Gibson result above comes from that page.
What is true is narrower: Gibson publish nothing for the years before 1975. Their page starts there. So the 1950s and 1960s instruments — the ones people most want dated, and the ones worth the most money — are not covered, by them or by this page.
This page used to fill that gap with a compilation from a guitar marketplace. It no longer does, and the reason is worth stating. That compilation is published under terms forbidding automated access and reuse. The numbers in it are facts, and facts cannot be copyrighted — but the work of assembling them is somebody else’s, and a page arguing for honest sourcing cannot help itself to the one table it did not ask permission for. The gap is now shown as a gap.
Gibson’s formats overlap one another heavily, and they document it: a nine-digit
number reads as both day-coded and model-year-coded, and a six-digit one can be a Les Paul
Classic, an SG reissue or an ES reissue. Every match is shown. Two of their own warnings
are easy to miss — serials beginning 94 are Centennial-year numbers
carrying no day despite their length, and the 2014 to mid-2019 numbers encode no day at
all, so a 2015 model may have been built in late 2014.
For a pre-1975 instrument, or any artist signature model, Gibson ask that you contact them at service@gibson.com. For anything valuable the potentiometer date codes, the neck stamp and a written appraisal settle it, not a serial.
Ibanez: the only one here that gives you a month
Ibanez encode the date in the serial rather than publishing a table, which makes
them the most informative of the five — an old-style number gives the month, the
year and how many guitars were built that month before yours.
A761356 is the 1,356th Ibanez made in January 1976.
The schemes are transcribed from Ibanez Rules, a long-standing reference, and checked against its own worked examples. Ibanez publish no official chart, so this is a named third party like Gibson — but unlike Gibson the rules are arithmetic rather than observed ranges, and they either fit or they don’t.
Where a reading is impossible rather than merely uncertain, it is dropped and the page
says why. F712345 read as an old-style serial would be June 2071, and Ibanez
put no serials on guitars before 1975, so the digits cannot mean 1971 either. That leaves
one answer, 1987, and you are told how it was narrowed.
What is not covered: Samick, World, Indonesian and Chinese factories. The reference states outright that its author is not familiar enough with those schemes to explain the dating, so this page names the factory and stops. Inventing a rule to fill the gap would be worse than the gap.
Taylor: the most precise of the lot
Taylor encode the date in the serial and publish exactly how, which makes them the
only maker here that will tell you the factory, the year, the month, the day and
where your guitar sat in that day’s production. Their own worked example:
1107064001 is the first guitar built at El Cajon on 6 July 2014.
There are three encoded formats — nine digits from 1993 to 1999, eleven from January 2000 to October 2009, and ten from November 2009 onward. The ten-digit one has a quirk worth knowing: the year is split across digits 2 and 7, not kept together.
Before 1993 Taylor did not encode dates, so those fall back to their published range table, which this page carries in full. Three rows in it are not plain ranges and are shown rather than matched: 1974 had no serial numbers at all, 1975 is a compound, and 1977 spans a mid-year switch from five-digit to three-digit numbers. Forcing those into a range would invent a boundary Taylor never stated. Taylor also note that early record keeping was patchy.
Source: Taylor’s own support page.
Epiphone: the widest spread of factories, and reused codes
Epiphone have built in Korea, China, Indonesia, Japan and the Czech Republic, with a different serial format for several of them. They publish no table, so this uses the Unofficial Epiphone Wiki, a named third-party compilation — the same standing as Gibson and Ibanez here, and below Martin, Taylor, Fender and Gretsch.
Five formats are covered: an all-numeric one from 2008, two factory-letter forms (one with the month as digits, one as a letter), the short Elite/Elitist serial from Japan, and the all-numeric pre-1994 form that omits the factory entirely.
The specific codes, and which of them are ambiguous, are on the wiki’s own page. This page tells you which letter is on your serial — that is printed on your instrument, not compiled by anyone — and sends you there to read it.
Yamaha: the letter that means six different years
Yamaha have used at least seven serial systems since 1946, and the one that ran from
1991 to 2003 has a flaw worth understanding before you trust any decoder’s answer:
a single letter encodes the year, and it repeats every ten years.
H means 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011. The serial cannot
say which.
Yamaha fixed it in 2004 by using two letters for the year, so anything
from then on decodes exactly — QPM044C is the 44th guitar built in June
2009, and there is no ambiguity in it at all. This page gives you an exact answer where
the scheme allows one and six candidate years where it does not.
H to P, but October, November and December are
X, Y, Z — not a continuation of the run.
Several third-party decoders and summaries give Q, R,
S instead, which is wrong and shifts three months of the year. The letters
used here are from the published table.
The 1986–1990 format is worse, because the reference contradicts
itself. It states that the first letter is the year and the next digit the
month, then gives a worked example, L8818, which it reads as May
1988 — and that requires L to be the month. Both readings are
shown, because there is no way to tell which was intended and choosing one would be a
guess wearing a confident face.
Two more honest limits. Serials from 1946 to 1968 carry no date at all — that is the scheme, not a gap, and no decoder can get round it. And Taiwanese, Indonesian, Custom Shop and Music Craft instruments use separate systems this page does not carry. Source: Guitar Insite, a named third-party reference; Yamaha publish no table of their own.
Rickenbacker: use theirs, not ours
Rickenbacker have encoded the build date since 1961 — but they do not publish the scheme. They run an official decoder instead, and their own page refers readers to a printed book for the rest.
So there is nothing to transcribe, and this page sends you to the maker’s free tool rather than offering a worse copy of it. That is the honest answer even though it means a visitor leaves. One thing worth knowing before you go: Rickenbacker state that Steel Guitar serials from 1954 to 1960 carry no date information and can be confused with amplifier serials.
Every maker, and what is known about each
The names below are the manufacturers on Wikipedia’s list of guitar manufacturers, plus any maker looked at since. It is not every guitar maker in the world — no such list exists, and thousands of individual luthiers and house brands appear in no register at all.
Decoded on this page
| Maker | Source, and what it gives |
|---|---|
| C.F. Martin | Martin's own table. Exact year, 1898-2025. |
| Alvarez | Dated by the Japanese Emperor’s reign year until 2000, then a plain year. |
| ESP | Imports give country and year; Japanese neck-plate ranges overlap and are “likely” only. |
| Washburn | Year and month from the first four digits; century not always determinable. |
| B.C. Rich | Their own page. Month codes skip B, D, I and O; five formats since 1974. |
| Charvel | USA San Dimas ranges 1981–86; modern Japanese JC prefix. |
| Jackson | Japanese Professional 1990–95 and modern imports; USA needs Jackson’s charts. |
| Schecter | Diamond Series imports only — no other Schecter era encodes a date. |
| Godin | Fiscal year starting in August — the calendar year is often one earlier. Covers Seagull and four sister brands. |
| Hagström | Modern reissues only. Vintage Swedish serials are a production run number, not a date. |
| Höfner | German-made from 1986 only. Earlier instruments are dated by features, not serials. |
| Cort | Prefix gives a plant and a decade, not a date. Cort also build for many other brands. |
| Dean | USA seven digits start with the year; imports from 2008 give factory, year and month. |
| Eastman | 2020 onward only. Earlier serials do not encode a date. |
| Peavey | Most carry no date at all. USA 1978–95 needs a mapping table this page does not have. |
| Danelectro | Week is exact, year never is — only one digit of the year is encoded. |
| Duesenberg | Their own page. Year and production number, with their documented exceptions. |
| Framus | Their own page — and the serial dates nothing. A separate year stamp does. |
| Gordon Smith | Consecutive numbering, no date. The maker checks their records. |
| Vox | No register exists. JMI kept no UK records and the Italian data was never published. |
| Warwick | Their own page. Month letter, internal number, year. |
| G&L | Prefix gives an era, never a year. The date is written on the neck heel and inside the body. |
| Hamer | First digit is the year, so the decade is open — but printed versus stamped settles it. |
| Larrivée | No published scheme. Larrivée run an instant lookup; pre-1977 guitars have no serial at all. |
| Music Man | No date in the serial. Their database covers San Luis Obispo letter-prefixed numbers only. |
| Ovation | Withdrawn pending permission. 97 entries from the site Ovation’s own FAQ names, and they were the whole of it: Ovation publish no chart to fall back on, so this maker now dates nothing here. |
| Heritage | Withdrawn pending permission. Their terms forbid reproducing any part of their site without written permission, which is the same clause that took Martin and Browning off this page. Heritage run their own dating page and it answers this better than we could — the link is in the reading. |
| Tokai | 33 table entries withdrawn pending permission, covering 1977 to 1986. The two-digit-year rule from 1988 survives, because it is a rule rather than a row — and a 2000s reading now says a second reading existed and cannot be shown. |
| Vantage | Seven digits give year and month. The 1984–88 year digit is flagged unconfirmed at the source, and stays flagged here. |
| Aria | Six formats, two of which collide. The source names the clashes and the rules here reproduce them exactly. |
| Maton | Checked at the maker: their FAQ has no serial information and points owners to the Maton Museum. |
| National / Valco | Ranges exist, in Brozman's book, and are not this page's to copy. The entry names the book and points at it. |
| Harmony | Two companies. The modern one publishes an exact scheme; the vintage stamp gives a firm year and a half-year that three sources read differently. |
| Lowden | No published scheme, and Lowden say openly that their own records have gaps. They will still date it. |
| Collings | Electrics give the year the build STARTED. Collings use the ship date, four to five months later, when they say what year it is. |
| Tom Anderson | The serial is simply the date, written out. The most precise dating here, and the least decoded. |
| Hohner | Hohner Service say on their own forum that the serial does not give the year. Different factories built the same model at once. |
| Samick | CC BY-SA source, so freely reusable. Formats changed every few years and collide; a W.O. prefix means it is a Cort, not a Samick. |
| Silvertone | Sears' own brand, never a factory. Built by Danelectro, Harmony, Valco, Kay, Teisco and Thomas — three of which are decoded here. |
| Spector | They publish an official USA serial document. It is a scan with no text, so nothing of it is transcribed here — go and read it. |
| Kay | Never published a numbering system. The stamp inside tells you whether you have a lot number, a model number, or one nobody has decoded. |
| Dobro | Gibson publish it. The modern serial splits the date across both ends — year digit first, decade digit last. |
| Kalamazoo | Gibson's budget brand, and both of its runs ended before 1975 — which is where Gibson's published scheme starts. |
| Kramer | Gibson-owned since 1997, and Gibson's serial page has no Kramer section. The vintage registry sits behind an expired certificate. |
| Alembic | Year, model and instrument number. One unbroken sequence since 1972, so the year and the number can be checked against each other. |
| Sadowsky | Two complete tables of their own. NYC has no overlaps at all and one missing number; MetroLine overlaps nine times. |
| Tanglewood | No scheme published. Their FAQ asks for photographs instead, and the widely repeated year-first claim is not theirs. |
| K. Yairi | The same workshop and the same heel stamp as Alvarez Yairi, so it shares that decoder. Labels and stamps can disagree by a year. |
| Ampeg | They kept accurate logs and the logs did not survive the changes of ownership. Pot codes are what is left. |
| D’Angelico | A US prefix means Korea or Indonesia depending on the series, and never the United States. |
| Mosrite | No serial-to-year table exists, but from late 1964 the assembly date is stamped on the neck and in the neck pocket. |
| Steinberger | Gibson bought them in 1987 and hold the logs. Their serial page does not cover Steinberger, Kramer, Tobias or Valley Arts. |
| Lakland | They publish a serial sheet whose text is outlined artwork, so nothing here can read it. The second such document on this page. |
| Fernandes / Burny | Mostly unnumbered on purpose, to avoid being trackable ahead of US trademark litigation. The 1978 Burnys agree with Tokai's scheme. |
| Greco | Three formats. The five-digit one is ambiguous for half its range and resolves itself for the other half, because the format stopped in 1994. |
| Antoria | A British badge on Japanese guitars, never a factory. The 1970s ones came from FujiGen — the Ibanez factory. |
| Avalon | Only the Silver Series decodes, and it is the one built in Korea rather than in Ireland. |
| Shergold | Two serial numbers that disagree is normal, because necks were made in batches. Their own ranges are on their site. |
| Tobias | Serial 2044 divides California-built from Gibson-built — not the 1990 purchase date, which is nearly a thousand instruments out. |
| Parker | The same six digits read one way on a Fly and another on a NiteFly. The model decides, not the number. |
| Sigma | Sigma serials carry no year at all, except the 1981–82 band that a Martin table would call 2002. |
| Guyatone | No scheme could be established, and many carry no serial at all. The formats in circulation are unverified by their own authors. |
| Vigier | They publish the scheme and its limit in the same breath — black hardware especially. The real date is stamped elsewhere on the instrument. |
| Lâg | Exact to the month. They publish one factory code and no list, so any other two letters are left unexplained rather than guessed. |
| Airline | Montgomery Ward's badge, never a factory. Built by Valco, Kay and Harmony — all three decoded here, which no other badge entry can say. |
| Hondo | No serials before 1984. Three widely believed things about them are false, and the 1977 logo has a typo that dates the guitar. |
| Stella | Oscar Schmidt before 1939, Harmony after. The later ones date from Harmony's stamp; the earlier ones are a different instrument entirely. |
| Ramírez | No chart, but they will certify the year outright — and they say plainly which labelled guitars are not theirs at all. |
| Jolana | The serial exists and means nothing, which is worse than none. The modern owner has already said they cannot help with vintage ones. |
| Electra | The serial dates nothing; the model number identifies it across six brands. And 2259 was used on two different guitars. |
| Modulus | Year first — and their own wording says it is when the neck and body were BUILT, not when it was finished. |
| Bond Electraglide | No scheme, and none needed — the company built them for three years and then stopped. |
| Valley Arts | The registry says the serials are hopeless and points at the neck heel, where the date was written by hand. |
| Teton | Their own FAQ: the two digits after the E are the year, and they say nothing about the rest. |
| Hermanos Conde | No serial at all — the workshop changed its name three times, so the label puts it in one of three eras. |
| .strandberg* | Factory letter and year from their own support page — and they tell you outright which digits are unreliable, which nobody else does. |
| Supro | A Valco badge. Same numbering, same reason it is not reproduced here. |
| Gurian | Four series, four workshops, each restarting at 1100 — and the years are approximate because the source says they are. |
| Epiphone | Gibson’s own published formats: year, month and unit. The Unofficial Epiphone Wiki’s 44 factory codes are withdrawn pending permission, so the serial still gives a date and no longer names the factory. |
| Fender | Withdrawn pending permission. 107 rules from Fender's own US, Mexican and Japanese charts, covering 1976 to 2018. Their terms were never read — their host refuses automated requests, including for the terms page — and nothing survives the rules, because Fender's scheme is the prefix table. |
| Gibson | Gibson's own published formats, 1975 onward. Before 1975 they publish nothing, and the page says so. |
| Gretsch | Gretsch's own page. Their table contradicts itself in eight places. |
| Guild | Guild’s own page. Sequential 1960–79; per-model prefixes 1979–97; approximate 1950s. |
| Ibanez | Ibanez Rules. Year and month; Japanese and Cort factories only. |
| PRS | Exact from 2008; before that the prefix repeats every ten years. |
| Squier | Covered by Fender's Japanese chart (JV and SQ series). |
| Taylor | Taylor's own page. Factory, year, month, day and daily sequence. |
| Takamine | Takamine’s own page. Year and month; two official readings of the same digits. |
| Yamaha | Guitar Insite. Exact from 2004; before that the year letter repeats every decade. |
Checked, and cannot be decoded here
| Maker | Why not |
|---|---|
| Foals | Not a serial scheme at all. Foals use a scratch-off authentication code entered on their own site - nothing can be decoded from it by anyone, by design. |
| Rickenbacker | They encode the date but publish no scheme. Rickenbacker run their own decoder; use it. Steel Guitars 1954-60 carry no date at all. |
What this page could not take, and why
Tacoma. Fender bought Tacoma in 2004 and used to publish a dating article for them, describing a letter for the year from 1998 and Julian day-of-year digits. It is still not transcribed here, and the reason changed on 12 September 2026. It used to be that we could not read it: support.fender.com and www.fender.com both returned 403 to an automated request. That is no longer true — both answer normally now. What is true instead is that the article has gone. It returns 404 on Fender’s US support site and on their Japanese one, which was the last place it survived. Fender restructured that support site and this piece did not come across.
A search engine will still show you a summary of it, assembled while the page existed. This page will not transcribe a scheme from a summary of a source that no longer exists — the same rule as before, with a stronger case for it. When Fender were merely refusing us, anybody could still open the article and check us. Now nobody can. A dead link is not a licence to guess.
What Fender do still publish is their dating article for American-made instruments, which is where the Fender ranges above come from and which was re-read on 12 September 2026.
A handful of makers are missing from the results above, and one era of Gibson is missing from a maker that is present, for a reason worth setting out rather than burying — because it is not the reason people assume. The information exists. It is published. A person can read it in a browser this afternoon. It simply is not this page’s to copy, and in each case somebody has made that clear in one way or another.
Asked us not to, in writing
One marketplace publishes an excellent Gibson dating guide. Their terms of use forbid automated access “for any purpose whatsoever” without written permission. This page carried 103 of their serial ranges before anyone read that sentence — their robots file says nothing of the kind, and checking only the robots file gave exactly the wrong answer. The ranges are gone.
What replaced them was better, which is the part worth knowing: Gibson publish a detailed scheme of their own that this page had wrongly claimed did not exist. Going back to the maker beat the compilation. It usually does.
Santa Cruz is the same story with a happier ending. They publish per-model serial ranges — a separate sequence for dreadnoughts, for OMs, for the Tony Rice models and eight more, so the same number means different years on different guitars. Their terms of service list using “robots, spiders or scrapers” among the things you agree not to do, and claim the compilation as theirs. That was read before anything was copied, not months afterwards, and nothing of theirs is on this page. Their dating guide is excellent and it is one click away on their own site.
Asked us not to, on the door
The site holding the shared Matsumoku numbering — which covers Aria, Electra, Westone, Vantage and more — returns a notice explaining that it refuses automated access and asking that it not be scraped. Reverend publish their serial listing openly but sit behind bot protection that stops anything automated before it reaches the page.
Both are requests, and both are being honoured. It would take about ten minutes to get round either. That is precisely why it has not been done: a page whose whole argument is that it sources honestly cannot make an exception for the ten minutes where nobody would notice.
Nobody said no, and nobody said yes
Three compilations came off this page on 14 September 2026, and none of their compilers has refused anything. That is the point. Each publishes either a bare copyright notice or no terms at all, and an absent restriction is not a permission any more than an unreadable one is. Letters are outstanding for all three.
| Whose | What went |
|---|---|
| Ovation Tribute | 97 entries — the six-digit sequence from 1972, the Adamas sequence, and the letter prefixes. The largest extraction this page ever carried. Ovation’s own FAQ has no chart and sends owners here, which is an argument for asking and is not an answer from either of them. |
| Vintage Japan Guitars | 33 entries — Tokai’s year-first prefixes for the Gibson-style and Fender-style replicas, and the three neck-plate range tables, covering 1977 to 1986. They are the most-used single source on this site: Tokai, Fernandes and Greco all rest on them, which makes this the most overdue letter of the three. |
| Unofficial Epiphone Wiki | 44 factory codes and what each one means. Their certificate has expired, so their terms could not be read at all — which is a reason to ask, not a reason to help ourselves. |
What survives is the difference between a table and a rule. Ibanez’s month letters, Greco’s year digits, Yamaha’s two ciphers, Fernandes’s one rule and Tokai’s two-digit year are all still here. They are arithmetic you do on the number in front of you, written out in this page’s own words, and removing them would leave a page that explains nothing while taking nothing of anyone’s away. What went is the rows: somebody else’s collected observations, which is the part that took the work and the part that is theirs.
Every one of these reverses the day a letter is answered. The data is off this page and out of this repository, and it is still on disk.
Somebody’s book
The National and Valco serial ranges exist because Bob Brozman compiled them for National Resonator Instruments in 1993, and Valco’s own records do not survive. Retyping a commercially published book here would be the same act as the one above with an extra step in front of it. The entry names the book and points at it instead.
Nobody left to ask
Westone, and the vintage half of Kramer, are a different case again: the sites holding their schemes have broken security certificates. Nobody refused anything. The pages have simply been left running long enough to stop working, which is its own kind of answer about how long this information survives.
Kramer is worth following up on, because giving up on it was the wrong call. Chasing the dead link led to Gibson, who have owned Kramer since 1997 — and to the discovery that Gibson’s serial page, which Kramer’s own support link now redirects to, has no Kramer section in it at all. Kramer has its own entry in the results above now, saying exactly that. A broken link is a reason to look somewhere else, not a reason to stop.
What you should do about it
Go and look yourself. Every one of these is readable by a human being, and for several of them the page names the exact source above. That is not a consolation prize — for a valuable instrument it is what you should be doing anyway.
Permission is being sought where there is somebody to ask. If it is granted, the tables will appear here and will say so. If it is refused, this section will get longer, and that is a perfectly good outcome too.
Looked at, and nothing usable was found
These 162 have been researched. They are not in the unchecked list below, and that distinction is the point of this section. “Nobody has looked” and “somebody looked and came back empty” are different answers, and only one of them means it is worth you looking again.
They were in that list until now, which made the sentence under it untrue for every one of them. That is corrected here rather than quietly.
They publish nothing
No scheme on their own site, and none found anywhere that could be checked. For most of these the maker will answer an email, which is the honest route and often a better one.
| Maker | What was found |
|---|---|
| Amada | Nothing published and nothing findable. |
| America Sejung | Nothing published. A distributor rather than a maker: it imported S101 and Canvas instruments from a Sejung factory at Qingdao between 2002 and 2013, which at least brackets them. |
| Ashton Music | Nothing published by the Australian distributor behind the brand. |
| Babicz | Nothing published about serial numbers; a trading-era company with no dating page. |
| Bartell | Nothing published, though the window is narrow: Paul Barth and Ted Peckels built in Riverside, California from 1964 to 1969, about 2,000 in total. |
| BassLab | Nothing published. Heiko Hoepfinger has been building composite instruments in Germany since 1993, going properly commercial in 2001. |
| Bear Creek | Nothing published by the Hawaiian shop building Weissenborn-style instruments. |
| Beneteau | Nothing published. Marc Beneteau has built in south-western Ontario since 1974. |
| Bill Lawrence | Nothing published on the guitars, which are the lesser-known half of him: Japanese Stratocaster and Telecaster copies into the late 1980s, then a US line under the Wilde name from 1997. He is remembered for pickups, and designed them for Fender, Gibson and Peavey. |
| Blackbird | Nothing published. Small San Francisco shop building composite instruments — email is the route. |
| Bohemian | Nothing published about numbering on their oil-can instruments. |
| Breedlove | No scheme on their own site. |
| C.R. Alsip | Nothing published. Jake Willoughby has built custom solidbodies since 2012, first in Kansas and now in Georgia; the shop is named for his late mother. |
| Campbell | Nothing published beyond a plain sequence — the first production instrument was serial 001. Campbell American build in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. (Wikipedia’s list shows this one as just “Campbell”.) |
| Caparison | Nothing about serial numbers on their own site. |
| Casio | Nothing published. They built real electric guitars with synthesizers inside — the MG-510, the PG-380, and the DG-10 and DG-20 — around 1987–88, which at least brackets them tightly. |
| Chapman | Nothing on their own site: their Q&A does not mention serial numbers. See the next section for what does circulate. |
| Chesbro | The parent company of Teton, whose scheme IS published and is decoded on this page. Nothing separate for instruments badged Chesbro. |
| Creston | Nothing published. Creston Lea has built in Burlington, Vermont since 2004. |
| D’Alegria | Nothing published. Custom shop in Rio de Janeiro since 2003, basses first and guitars from 2006. |
| Daisy Rock Girl | Nothing published, and this one was checked properly: they have a real FAQ and it does not mention serial numbers at all. Founded by Tish Ciravolo in 2000. |
| Del Vecchio | Nothing published, and specifically noted as poorly recorded outside Brazil. Casa Del Vecchio of São Paulo has been going since 1902 and made the Dinâmico resonators from the 1930s. |
| Diamond | Nothing published about numbering. |
| Dingwall | Numbered sequentially, and not even strictly: the shop says the numbers are not an absolute. Some instruments carry a build date written inside by hand, and Dingwall will answer directly. |
| Eccleshall | Nothing published. Chris Eccleshall, 1948–2020, an English luthier and an authorised repairer for Martin, Gibson and Guild, who also built solidbodies as “Electric Lady”. Instruments turn up dated by dealers rather than by number. |
| Echopark | Nothing published. Gabriel Currie, from Echo Park in Los Angeles and later Detroit. |
| Egmond | Nothing readable in the numbers, and stated plainly by those who collect them: an Egmond can only be placed roughly, from catalogues and from which parts it uses. Built at Eindhoven and later Best, in the Netherlands. |
| El Degas | Nothing usable, for the simplest reason: these almost never carry a serial number in the first place. |
| Electrical Guitar Company | Nothing published. Wikipedia’s list shows this one as plain “Electrical”, which is a link label rather than a name. |
| Electromuse | Nothing published and nothing findable about their numbering. |
| ES Guitars | Nothing published — and worth a warning, because searching for it returns ESP, which is a different company and IS decoded on this page. ES Guitars was American, built in Connecticut from 2003, and closed in 2015. |
| Farida | Nothing published by the brand, founded 2004. |
| Fibenare | Nothing published. The Benedek brothers have been building in Hungary since 1998. |
| First Act | Nothing published about serial numbers. |
| Flaxwood | Nothing published. Founded 2005, after a 2003 prototype. |
| Floyd Rose | Nothing published for the guitars. The name is far better known for the tremolo, which is what the searches return. |
| Freedom | Nothing published by Freedom Custom Guitar Research. |
| Freshman | Nothing published; their contact form asks for a serial, which is the route. |
| Fret-King | Nothing published. Trev Wilkinson’s brand, building since 2008. |
| FujiGen | Striking, this one: they built for Ibanez, Fender Japan, Gretsch and Epiphone, and their own site has no serial page at all. |
| Fylde | Sequential on the label inside, with no published key. Roger Bucknall has been building since 1973 and is still there, which makes an email the obvious route. |
| Galanti | Nothing published. An accordion factory at Mondaino that added electric guitars in the 1950s; the Grand Prix models are the ones that turn up. |
| Gallotone | Nothing published. Cheap South African beginners’ instruments of the 1950s and 60s, exported widely. |
| Garrison | Nothing published. The window is at least bounded: founded 1999, bought by Gibson in 2007, the St John’s factory closed in 2010. |
| Gilberto Grácio | Nothing published. A Lisbon maker, 1936–2021, third generation of a luthier family. |
| Gittler | Nothing published, and barely needed: about 60 were built in New York between the middle 1970s and the early 1980s. |
| Greg Bennett | Nothing published under that name. It is Samick’s own designed line, and the Samick entry on this page is worth trying — on the understanding that nothing found says Greg Bennett instruments use Samick’s numbering. |
| Grimshaw | Nothing published. Dated examples turn up in the 600s for 1974 and the 1700s for 1978–79, which is a sequence somebody could reconstruct and nobody has. |
| Hallmark Guitars | Nothing published. Joe Hall, formerly of Mosrite, founded it in 1966 and it went bankrupt in 1968; the name was revived later. |
| Hora | Nothing published by the Romanian factory. |
| Howe-Orme | Nothing published and nothing findable about their numbering. |
| Hoyer | Nothing published, and stated bluntly by those who know the instruments: there is no code in an older Hoyer serial to read. Founded in Schönbach in 1874. |
| Huss & Dalton | No dating page; they answer by email instead. |
| Instruments of Africa | Nothing published. Ezekiel Olaleye’s Africa-shaped electrics, from 2016. |
| Italia | Nothing published anywhere findable. |
| James Tyler | Nothing published on serial numbers by the shop or anywhere citable. |
| Jeffrey Yong | Nothing published. A Malaysian luthier building since 1985, known for local timbers; he founded the Guitar Institute Malaysia in 1993. |
| Jens Ritter | Nothing published. Fifty to sixty instruments a year by hand at Deidesheim since the middle 1990s, which is small enough that asking will work. Wikipedia carries this shop twice, as “Jens Ritter Instruments” and “Ritter Bass Guitars”. |
| Jon Kammerer Guitars | Nothing published. Founded 1999. |
| Joseph Lukes | Nothing published. A shop that builds each instrument start to finish rather than on a line, which is usually a sign there is no scheme to find. |
| Kawai | Undocumented either side of their buying Teisco in 1967. |
| Ken Parker | Nothing published about his archtops. Not to be confused with Parker Guitars, whose Fly scheme IS decoded on this page — he designed those, and left. |
| Kent | Nothing usable. Many carry no serial at all; the 700 and 800 had a foil sticker that is usually long gone. |
| Klira | History well documented; numbering not at all. |
| Koll | Nothing published. Instruments built under the Premier Builders Guild label are reported to be tellable apart by how the number is written on the headstock, which identifies a period and not a year. |
| Lado | Nothing published. |
| Langcaster | Nothing published, and one detail worth the trip: the swamp kauri their bodies are cut from has been carbon-dated by two universities at more than 35,000 years old. The only instrument here where radiocarbon dating has been used, and it dates the tree rather than the guitar. |
| Lester DeVoe | Nothing published. A flamenco and classical luthier at Nipomo, California, whose instruments went to Paco de Lucía and Sabicas. |
| Lichty | Nothing published. Building in Tryon, North Carolina since 2009. |
| Lipe | Nothing published. Mike Lipe, building in California. |
| Lotus | Nothing usable. A house brand built by several different factories — Samick, Cort, Morris — and many have no number at all. |
| Mann | Nothing published — and not what the list implies. Wikipedia links “Mann” to Ibanez, but it was a Canadian brand of Great West Import Co., sold roughly 1971 to 1985 and built at FujiGen Gakki, the factory that also built Ibanez. FujiGen publish nothing either, which is the real reason this is a dead end. |
| Manson Guitar Works | Nothing published. The Devon shop numbers limited editions within their run, which places an instrument in its batch and not in a year. |
| Marchione | Nothing published about serial numbers. |
| Mayones | Nothing published; they ask owners to contact a dealer. |
| Michael Kelly | Nothing published; the site asks for serials only for warranty. |
| Moniker | Nothing published. |
| Paulino Bernabe II | Nothing published. Madrid classical workshop, second generation. |
| RainSong | No date is encoded in the number at all, which is the answer rather than a gap. They ask owners to contact them. |
| Recording King | Nothing published; their support address is the route. |
| Riversong Guitars | Nothing published. Sicamous, British Columbia. |
| Ruokangas | Nothing published; they answer by email. |
| Slingerland | Nothing published on the guitars, and the window is narrow: they built banjos, archtops and the Songster electric through the 1920s and 30s, and stopped making stringed instruments in 1940 for drums. So a Slingerland guitar is pre-war, whatever else is unknown. |
| Smith Custom Amplifiers | Nothing published. Sammy Smith has built amplifiers in Montgomery, Alabama since 2002 and guitars as well, which is why a name that looks like an amplifier company is on a list of guitar makers. |
| Solar Guitars | Nothing published. Their warranty registration asks for the serial without saying what it means. |
| Specimen Products | Nothing published. Ian Schneller has built in Chicago since 1984. |
| Speranski | Nothing published and nothing findable. |
| Stagg | Nothing published by the Belgian distributor behind the brand. |
| Starr Labs | Nothing published. Harvey Starr has built MIDI controllers at San Diego since 1986 — the Ztar is a controller rather than a guitar, which is most of why there is nothing to date. |
| Strunal | Nothing published by the Czech factory. |
| Suhr | Their own FAQ says nothing about serial numbers. |
| Supersound Electronic Products | Nothing published. Alan and Mary Wootton built the first British solidbodies in Kent from 1952; the numbers were never documented. |
| Tagima | Nothing published. Brazilian, founded 1986 by Seizi Tagima, brand sold on in 1996. |
| Teisco | The company history is well recorded. The numbering is not. |
| Tonante | Nothing published. Brazilian, founded 1954 as Ao Rei dos Violões Limitada. |
| Trembita | Nothing published by the Ukrainian factory. |
| TYM | Nothing published. Small Brisbane shop, building since 1997. |
| Wechter | Nothing published. Instruments carry a tag inside the body and the numbering appears to be a plain count. Wikipedia carries this shop twice, as “Abraham Wechter” and “Wechter Guitars”. |
| Weissenborn | Nothing to read, because there is almost nothing there: these carry virtually no serial numbers at all, and the four or five known are thought to be later additions. Dating is done from features and measurements. |
| Westfield | Nothing published. UK budget brand from 1989, revived in 2022. |
A scheme is in circulation, and it traces to nobody
These are the uncomfortable ones. A specific, plausible, confident scheme is repeated across the internet and could not be traced to the maker or to any source that could be checked. Printing one here would make it look exactly as solid as the schemes on this page that are sourced, which is precisely why it is not printed.
| Maker | What was found |
|---|---|
| Behringer | Behringer have said publicly that “after the first letter, the first two numbers tell you the year” — but they said it about a mixing desk. Nothing found says it covers their guitars, and carrying a rule across a product line on the strength of a shared badge is the mistake this page keeps refusing to make. |
| Bigsby | A neat pattern fits the documented instruments — month, day, two-digit year, so 51649 is 16 May 1949 and 91558 is 15 September 1958. Both readings come from auction and dealer listings, and Wikipedia’s article on Bigsby says nothing about serial numbers at all, which was checked for specifically. Very few were built: historians document around sixty surviving instruments. |
| Blade | Detailed ranges circulate for the Levinson years — 71xxx to 110xxx for 1987–93, Swiss-built below 130xxx and Korean above — and they trace to forum indexes and a personal site. |
| Cole Clark | A specific scheme circulates — one year digit and two month digits before 2010, four digits after. It could not be traced to Cole Clark or to anything else citable, and their own registration page is silent. Plausible is exactly the problem. |
| Dobro / OMI | Detailed ranges circulate for the Original Musical Instrument Company years and trace to a commercial magazine. Exactly the position the National / Valco entry sets out, for exactly the same family of instruments. |
| Eastwood | A year-first scheme is reported, and described as unconfirmed by the owners reporting it. |
| Eko | Serials are reported to appear erratically and to be no help at all, which may well be true and came from nowhere citable. |
| Favilla | A dating method that needs no number at all: the gold stamp on the front of the headstock is reported to sit about five degrees off true on pre-1951 instruments, and the firm changed its name during 1959. Both come from collectors rather than from anything citable, and both are easy to check yourself, which is the best that can be said for them. |
| Giannini | Craviolas are said to be dated from the label rather than a serial; the scheme could not be traced. |
| Heartfield | A specific and plausible scheme circulates: a month letter A–L, then two digits of year, then three of production number, with a different system on the Talons. It is set out on a dedicated Heartfield site that names no source and no author. The brand only ran 1989–1993 under Fender Japan, so the range is narrow either way. |
| Jay Turser | The claim that older models carry no serial and cannot be dated is probably true and traces to a commercial price guide. Their own site publishes nothing. |
| Kiesel | The claim that Carvin and Kiesel cannot be dated by serial is probably right and traces only to an unverified compilation. |
| Line 6 | Their own forum, and no Line 6 staff answer in it. One user offers “the first 2 digits are the year. The rest is confusing”; another proposes YYMM, reads 1202 as February 2012, then corrects himself to January in the same post. A scheme that cannot survive one post will not be printed here. |
| Luna | Shares a parent company with Dean, whose scheme is decoded here. No evidence was found that Luna shares it, and assuming so would be inventing one. |
| Lyle | Reported flatly that the serial does not help with dating. Imported from Japan by L. D. Heater of Portland; the claim traces to no one checkable. |
| Micro-Frets | Ranges circulate — 1000–1300 for 1967–69, 1323–3000 to 1971 — and trace to a commercial price guide. The same sources say the records barely exist, which is the part worth believing. |
| Penco | A Hoshino Gakki brand built in their own Nagoya factory between 1974 and 1978 — Hoshino being Ibanez’s parent. That is a reason to TRY the Ibanez entry, and not a reason to claim it works. Nothing found says Penco used the Ibanez scheme. |
| Pensa | A format that reads clearly, if the reports hold: a build count, a slash, then the date as MMDDYY. 1013/063022 is build 1013 finished on 30 June 2022; 0451/062711 is 27 June 2011. Three listings decades apart agree, which is more than most claims here manage — and it is still not Pensa’s own statement, so it is written down rather than built in. |
| Robin | Reported that the serial opens with the year, and that 020141 was the 141st built in Houston. It traces to a commercial magazine. |
| S. D. Curlee | The most specific reason yet found for a number meaning nothing: reportedly a bin of numbered plates, fitted at random, with no record kept, and production figures embellished besides. If that is right, no table could ever exist. It traces to a collector’s blog. |
| Suzuki | Two readings of the same six digits are in circulation and they contradict each other: year-then-sequence, and YYMMDD, with 770827 read as August 1977 either way but for different reasons. Neither comes from Suzuki. |
| Travis Bean | Production figures and a 1977 body-shape change are widely quoted; they trace to magazines and auction listings. |
| Univox | Pre-1976 neck-plate numbers are reported as arbitrary. The later Matsumoku numbering sits on the site that refuses automated access. |
| Vintage | The only substantive claim — that JHS kept no records before 2005 — comes from forum discussion. Their own site publishes nothing. |
| Walden | A scheme is quoted in words that sound like the maker’s own (“the first 2 digits of the SN written on our label”), but it is not on any Walden page this site could reach, including their warranty page. A quotation without its source is not a source. |
| Weymann | These can be dated, roughly. Instruments made after about 1910 carry the model and serial die-stamped on the end of the peghead, and Charles Robinson has built a serial-to-year table covering Weymann strings to 1923, with estimates to 1933, at leavingthisworld.com. He is candid about what it rests on: eight to ten reference instruments with documented provenance, a margin of plus or minus a year, and a standing request for more examples. It is his research, it has not been asked for, and it is linked rather than copied — the same position as Brozman’s National ranges. |
| Zemaitis | Reportedly no systematic numbering, with the family holding the records and acoustic label colours marking pre- and post-1971. All of it traces to commercial magazines. |
| Zon | Owners report the year in the LAST two digits and, elsewhere, in the FIRST two. Both readings have examples behind them and neither has a maker. |
They publish a page that answers a different question
Something exists, it is official, and it is not a dating scheme. Worth knowing before you go looking for one.
| Maker | What was found |
|---|---|
| Československé hudební nástroje | Not a brand but the Czechoslovak state combine, 1948 to 1992, at Hradec Králové. It owned Jolana — decoded on this page — along with Cremona, Delicia, Amati, Červený, Rieger-Kloss, Tofa and Petrof. If your instrument is Czech and of that era, Jolana is the entry to read first. |
| Baldwin | Two things to separate first, because Baldwin owned two guitar companies. They bought Burns in September 1965 and Gretsch in 1967, and only the Burns line wore the Baldwin badge — if yours says Gretsch, the Gretsch entry above covers the Baldwin era properly. A Baldwin-badged guitar is 1965 to 1970, which is the answer without any number at all. There is a date inside, and it is not the date you want. Burns and Baldwin instruments from 1963 to 1967 carry a signed inspection tag with a stamped date — and it records when the pickup rig was wired and tested, not when the guitar was assembled. On early Baldwin-logo instruments the two are reported to be as much as six months apart. A real date, honestly recorded, answering a different question. The serial is weaker still: neck plates were made in quantity and fitted as they came out of the box, so the number is roughly sequential and no more. All of it traces to a commercial magazine, the same position as the Burns figures above. |
| Cimar | A budget line built under the Ibanez parent, so the Ibanez entry is the one to try. Nothing found states that Cimar used Ibanez’s numbering, and this page will not assume it — the same restraint as Mann and Penco. |
| Elias Howe Company | The firm behind the Howe-Orme instruments, in Boston from the 19th century. Wikipedia carries the company and the brand as separate articles; they are one maker, and neither published a numbering. |
| Fodera | The serial gives the model and which instrument it was, and no date at all. Fodera will send the “birthdate” by email. |
| Furch | They have a serial number page. It explains where to FIND the number, not how to read it. |
| Hanson | Chicago, from 2005 — and the current owner of Lakland, which appears on this page among the makers whose own document could not be read. Nothing published under the Hanson name either. |
| Harley Benton | The serial exists only on a paper tag tied to a tuning peg, so a guitar that has left the shop usually has none. |
| Hoshino Gakki | The parent rather than a badge. Hoshino own Ibanez, which is decoded here, and have sold instruments as Cimar, Penco, Howard, Hy-Lo, Star, Imperial and Royal. Ibanez is the entry to try; nothing found says the other badges share its numbering. |
| Ken Lawrence | The number is sequential with no code in it, and that does not matter: the completion date is written inside the control cavity, on the cover. He also keeps a ledger of every instrument. Take the cover off before doing anything else. |
| KHS | The Taiwanese manufacturer, founded 1930, that built Walden instruments from 1996. Walden’s scheme is the one quoted on this page in words that sound like a maker’s and could not be found on any Walden page — KHS publish nothing either, so that remains where it is. |
| Korg, Roland and Akai | Filed under guitars, and not guitar makers in the ordinary sense. Roland built the synthesizer controllers shaped like guitars — and the G-505 was made at FujiGen Gakki, which is on this page’s list of factories that publish nothing. Nothing was found about dating any of the three by serial. |
| Kustom | Serial charts for Kustom exist and are good — and they are explicitly for amplifier heads and combos, not for the guitars. Reading a guitar with an amplifier’s chart would give an answer, and it would be meaningless. |
| Larson Brothers | The name is barely the point: Carl and August Larson sold through Maurer, Euphonon, Prairie State, Stetson and Stahl. Identifying which badge you have comes before any question of a date. They worked from 1900 until 1944. |
| Levin | Real tables exist for the Goya numbers, so heavily qualified with “circa” and wildcard digits that transcribing them would manufacture a precision the source does not claim. |
| Lindert | The neckplate number is reported to say where rather than when: Korean-built instruments carry one, usually beginning 9, and the American ones do not. Origin, not year. |
| Maestro | The modern Gibson-badged instruments have no dating worth the name, and the only source found says exactly that. |
| Magnatone | Serial numbers will not date these, and the useful answer is physical: the headstock rounded off around 1947 and squared again after a few years, the fingerboard went from black to cream around 1950, and the pickup cover changed from angled to straight-mounted at about the same time. Pot codes give a firm earliest date. |
| Matsuoka | Not a serial number at all, which is why nobody finds a scheme. The date is written inside, at the Spanish heel where the neck meets the body, as YYMMDD — so 770604 is 4 June 1977. Look before you decode. |
| Memphis | A Matsumoku badge, which puts it in the same family as Electra and Aria on this page. The model number identifies the instrument across brands; the serial does not date it. |
| Michael Tobias | The number marks a maker, not a year. Instruments below serial 2044 were built under Michael Tobias; above it they came from Gibson, with an overlap while he was still there. He began the separate MTD line in 1994. |
| MotorAve | Numbered consecutively in build order, so the serial is a position and not a date. From about 2005 the date of completion is engraved under the pickguard, which is the thing worth knowing; earlier ones carry no date code at all. |
| Petros | The numbering is a sequence, not a date: the first 32 instruments ran plainly, then a second phase began at 32001 with the last three digits in build order. Without a dated reference list that gives you a position in the queue and no year. |
| Sho-Bud | The serial is in plain numerical order and encodes neither model nor date — but the records exist. Gene Haugh, who worked at Sho-Bud at the time, holds the original production records and has posted a serial-to-month list on the Steel Guitar Forum. That is the route, and it is a better one than a table. |
| Stromberg | The loveliest answer found so far. Stromberg used their own business cards as labels, so the telephone number printed on the card dates the instrument — a Bowdoin exchange number for the early ones, a CA number later, and the changes are close enough together to bracket an instrument within a few years. The serial numbers themselves only run from about 300 to the 650s for the entire output, so they are nearly useless by comparison. The five numbers and the years they map to are withdrawn pending permission: they are the museum’s research and they are the whole of the method, so reproducing them here would replace their page rather than point at it. Read them at the Dutch Archtop Guitar Museum. |
| Veillette | Numbered in a plain sequence — #106 in 1979 under Veillette-Citron, #128 in 2013 under his own name — so the number counts instruments and not years. A one-man shop at Woodstock, New York, which makes asking the obvious route. |
| Vestax | Worth knowing what you may actually be holding: Vestax began in 1977 as an electric guitar company, long before the turntables, and built the Japanese-made D’Angelico New York guitars. Nothing published about numbering under either name, but the badge on the headstock may not be the firm that made it. |
| Wandre | The serial says nothing and the maker says everything: three different firms built them in sequence. Pelotti from about 1956–57 to 1960, Framez of Milan from 1960 to 1963, and Davoli from 1963 to 1965. Working out who built yours brackets it to a few years without any number at all. |
A person built it, and signed it
These are one-person shops, and looking for a numbering scheme is looking for the wrong thing: the instrument already carries the answer, written by the person who made it. Open the soundhole and read the label before going any further.
| Maker | What was found |
|---|---|
| Jimmy D’Aquisto | Signed into the wood with the date and the number together — one instrument reads “James L. D’Aquisto 1/11/82 #1”. A signature carrying a full date beats any scheme. |
| John Bailey | Labelled rather than serialised: one reads “Constructed by John Bailey 1963”. A British luthier of the 1960s folk revival, working to 2011. |
| William Laskin | Signs and dates instruments rather than numbering them; dealers list his guitars by year with no serial number at all. |
The maker says the records are gone
Different from publishing nothing, and worth separating: somebody went looking on your behalf and told you the answer does not exist any more. That closes the question rather than leaving it open.
| Maker | What was found |
|---|---|
| Fano | Their own FAQ: “When we took the business over from the Premier Builders Guild in 2017, there was no historical information relating to previous serial numbers supplier, so we are sorry to say that we have no or little information on any builds from the Arroyo Grande period and before.” They also say there have been several generations of numbering — their FAQ. Instruments from 2017 onwards are worth asking them about; earlier ones they cannot help with either. |
The source has gone
It existed, and it does not resolve any more.
| Maker | What was found |
|---|---|
| Burns | The site holding the serial ranges does not resolve at all. The other figures in circulation trace to a commercial magazine. If your instrument says Baldwin rather than Burns it is from 1965 or later — see the Baldwin row above, which has more to work with. |
| Pedulla | Mike Pedulla published a serial-to-date table on his own site and retired in 2019 after about 10,000 basses. pedulla.com now refuses connections entirely — not a block, nothing listening. The table is the maker’s own and copies circulate; this page will not reproduce one from a rehost of a site that has gone dark. |
If you know better for any of these — particularly a maker who publishes something this missed — please say so. A single link would move a maker out of this section, and that is the most useful correction anyone could send.
Both lists are finished
There is nothing waiting here. Wikipedia’s list of guitar manufacturers was worked through first; its categories, and their subcategories, then turned up 67 more entries the list had never carried — 64 makers, once the three filed under two articles each are counted once — and those are done too. 91 makers are decoded above, 158 were checked and came back with nothing usable, and the few that could not be reached at all are named with the reason in each case.
That is still a smaller claim than it sounds, and the difference is the point. Two particular lists have been worked through. That is not the same as every guitar maker, and no page could honestly say otherwise. Foals is the standing proof a few paragraphs up: selling instruments today, with a real and slightly surprising answer, and on neither list.
One oddity worth stating, since the numbers here are meant to be checkable. Wikipedia files three of those shops under two articles each — Abraham Wechter and Wechter Guitars, Jens Ritter Instruments and Ritter Bass Guitars, the Elias Howe Company and Howe-Orme. Each is counted once here and appears once in the tables, which is why 63 category entries come to 60 makers.
Two boundaries, now that there is nothing outstanding. The first is that “finished” describes lists, not the world, and the paragraph above says so. The second is narrower and worth stating plainly: the categories these makers came from also hold pickup manufacturers — Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, EMG, Fishman, Bare Knuckle and a dozen more.
They are not here, and they are not an oversight. A pickup has no date in it to find, and the question this page answers is when an instrument was built. Saying that once seemed better than a dozen rows reading “not applicable”.
So if your guitar is from a maker on either list, the answer here is a date or a reason there is no date, and both were checked. If it is not, this page has not looked yet — and telling us the name is the single most useful thing anyone reading this could do. It is how Foals got here.
Of the 253 makers looked at, 91 had something usable and 162 did not. Both figures are counted from this page rather than estimated, and the ratio is the honest headline: a little under half of all guitar makers cannot be dated from the serial number by anybody. Not by this page, and in most cases not by the maker either.
That is worth knowing before you start. A great deal of the internet is willing to give you a year for any number you type, and for roughly half of these makers there is no year in the number to give.
If a maker matters to you, the fastest route is usually the maker themselves: small workshops keep build records and will normally date an instrument from its serial if you ask.
Makers this page does not cover, and why
A maker missing from the list above is not an oversight, and the reason matters — it tells you where to look instead. There are four, and none of them is “we have not got to it yet” any more.
| Why it is missing | Example | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The maker runs their own decoder but does not publish the scheme | Rickenbacker | Use theirs — it is free and authoritative |
| The code is unguessable by design | Foals | Use the maker’s verification form; nothing else can work |
| No published scheme exists anywhere, official or otherwise | Many smaller builders | Email the maker — small workshops usually answer |
| The maker was never on the list this page worked through | Foals, once | Tell us the name — that is how Foals got here |
The second row is the one worth understanding, because it is not a gap that can ever be filled. Some makers issue a scratch-off security code rather than a date-encoded serial. Foals is a current example: their instruments carry an authentication label you scratch to reveal a code, which you then enter on their site. Their page says only that, and this one will not embroider it.
Nothing can be decoded from it, by anyone, ever — that is the entire point. A scratch-off code exists precisely so that it cannot be derived, predicted or read by a third party. Any site claiming to decode one is either guessing or lying. If your instrument has one of these, the maker’s own form is not the second-best option, it is the only one.
It is also worth noticing what that design tells you. A manufacturer who puts anti-counterfeiting labels on every instrument is saying, in effect, that fakes are a real problem in their market. That is useful to know before you buy secondhand — and it is a reason to actually use the verification rather than assume.
Common questions
My maker is not listed at all.
See the table above — there are four different reasons, and they lead to different places. If the maker is still trading, emailing them is usually faster than any decoder: small workshops keep build records and will normally look yours up.
Why does another site give one confident year and this one gives four?
Because for that serial Fender’s chart lists four, and the other site picked one. Ask which four it discarded and on what evidence. A narrower answer is not a better one unless something justifies the narrowing.
Can this value my guitar?
No, and nothing free can do it honestly. Sold-price data is behind paid, application-only access, and the freely available figures are asking prices — which include everything nobody bought. A number built from those would be wrong in the direction that costs you money.
Does this cover acoustic Fenders?
No. Fender states its acoustic serial numbers were never archived and are of no help in dating those instruments. That is their answer, not an omission here.
My serial is not in the tables at all.
For Martin that usually means a different series — Backpacker, Little Martin, a mandolin or a ukulele line — each of which has its own table. For Fender it may be a Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian or Chinese instrument, which use different prefixes covered in Fender’s other articles.