A Tokyo shop for parts and made-to-order guitars.

ESP stands for Electric Sound Products. In 1975, the company says, Hisatake Shibuya opened “a small workshop and retail store in Tokyo” under that name, first making upgraded replacement parts for existing guitars and then building complete instruments. Shibuya had sold electric guitars for Kawai and then for Yamaha, ESP says; its Japanese corporate profile adds a spell at Fernandes. The 1975 date is also given by NAMM, the American music-products association, in the introduction to its 2010 oral-history interview with Shibuya.

Who founded ESP is told in two ways. ESP’s English-language account names Shibuya alone. Its own Japanese corporate profile says he founded the guitar maker “together with three young men in their twenties.” Japanese Wikipedia, citing a 2010 book by Hidesato Shiino, the designer behind Fujigen’s Greco guitars, names Shiino and Moony K. Omote, the founder of Moon guitars, as co-founders, says the first shop was a converted clinic in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, and says Shiino and Omote left in 1977, when Shibuya took charge. Shiino’s own Japanese Wikipedia article gives the same years. We give ESP’s account and Shiino’s side by side.

ESP’s corporate history describes the company, set up in February 1975, as a maker of top-grade electric guitars and a trainer of guitar repairers. In 1978 it bought a building in Kanda-Nishikicho, in central Tokyo, and opened a shop there; in 1979 it began selling bodies and necks separately and launched what it calls Japan’s first full made-to-order system for electric guitars. Japanese Wikipedia says the shop was busy from the start, visited by session and rock guitarists of the period, and that the Japanese heavy-metal boom of the 1980s, with bands such as Loudness, carried the business forward.

New York, metal and Hollywood.

ESP went abroad early. Its Japanese history says it set up ESP-USA in New York in March 1981; English Wikipedia says its replacement parts reached the United States in 1983 and that, in 1984 and 1985, it built custom guitars for New York players including Vernon Reid of Living Colour, Bruce Kulick of Kiss and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones. Both Wikipedias say ESP also made bodies and necks for Kramer, as an original-equipment supplier; English Wikipedia names other customers, including Schecter, without a source.

Its first signature model came from a chance visit. English Wikipedia says George Lynch, then of Dokken, walked into an ESP shop in Tokyo in 1985 looking for a replacement neck and came away with the guitar that became the Kamikaze; Japanese Wikipedia lists Lynch, Kulick, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica among the players who made the name known. English Wikipedia credits ESP’s rise to the thrash metal of the 1980s — Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth — and says Hetfield’s ESP guitars in an Explorer-like shape became especially sought after.

The company grew sideways, too. Its corporate history lists a guitar-making school in 1983, the purchase of a Japanese agent for Seymour Duncan pickups the same year, factories in Tokyo, Nagoya and, from 1986, on Sado Island, Shibuya’s birthplace, and a New York shop on 48th Street. In 1993, English Wikipedia says, the American headquarters moved to Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Shibuya bought the guitar maker Schecter — in 1987 by Schecter’s account, in 1990 by ESP’s — and, in the mid-1990s, the Musicians Institute in Hollywood; ESP dates that purchase to 1994 in one place and January 1995 in another.

ESP is also a Japanese music-education group. Its history lists music schools, a piano-tuning school and later voice-acting and entertainment colleges in Japan, alongside a chain of guitar shops. In Japan its signature list runs from Char and Loudness’s Akira Takasaki to visual-kei players; a signature bass for J of Luna Sea sold more than 50,000 copies, the Japanese music site BARKS reported in 2018.

Rock and metal guitar makers.

The seven makers in this guide build electric guitars for rock and metal players, but they are organised in very different ways.

Two belong to Fender. Jackson, founded by Grover Jackson in Glendora, California, in 1980, and Charvel, begun by Wayne Charvel as a repair shop in Azusa in 1974 and sold to Grover Jackson in 1978, have both been owned by Fender since 2002, English Wikipedia says, and it gives Scottsdale, Arizona, as the base of both.

Two are linked through one man. ESP grew from Electric Sound Products, a parts shop that Hisatake Shibuya opened in Tokyo in 1975. In 1987, English Wikipedia says — ESP’s own corporate history gives 1990 — Shibuya bought Schecter, which David Schecter had started as a repair and parts shop in Van Nuys, California, in 1976, and which now gives its custom shop’s home as Sun Valley, Los Angeles; the two have remained separate companies.

Kiesel, in Escondido, California, traces its heritage to the pickup company Lowell Kiesel founded in Southern California in 1946, which became Carvin, and took its present name when it split from Carvin in 2015. Mayones was founded in Gdańsk, Poland, in 1982 by Zenon Dziewulski, Polish Wikipedia says, and is run by the Dziewulski family.

Cort, based in Seoul, is the odd one out: a large share of its output, by its own account, carries other brands’ names, and it makes its guitars in factories it runs in Indonesia and China.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Japan, Asia and North Hollywood.

ESP sells several names at different prices, and says plainly where each is made. Its American FAQ states: “ESP guitars are built in our main factory and custom-shop located in Japan,” while “LTD guitars are produced in our factories outside of Japan (currently Korea, Indonesia, China, and Vietnam)” on assembly lines, which makes them cheaper. The LTD line dates from the mid-1990s — English Wikipedia gives both 1995 and 1996. In 2013 and 2014, English Wikipedia says, the Japanese-made E-II line replaced the ESP Standard models sold outside Japan. ESP’s Japanese history says its Tokyo factory moved to Saitama in 2008 and its Sado factory followed in 2012; it also lists a subsidiary in Heilongjiang, China, from 1992.

There is an American-made tier as well. The company says the ESP USA shop opened in North Hollywood in 2014, after the line’s debut at that year’s Winter NAMM show, and calls the guitars “handcrafted in California.” Its American company, The ESP Guitar Company, gives a Los Angeles address, and since March 2015 it has distributed Takamine acoustic guitars in the United States, it announced. Japan has further lines of its own — Navigator, which English Wikipedia describes as high-grade copies of classic American designs, and Edwards and GrassRoots at lower prices.

Its custom shop is known for unusual commissions. Japanese and English Wikipedia mention a guitar shaped like a beam rifle from Mobile Suit Gundam, a Doraemon guitar and the elaborate shaped guitars of Toshihiko Takamizawa of THE ALFEE. ESP marked its 50th anniversary in 2025, the company says. We found no published brand guidelines and no official colour values.

For a design guide, ESP shows how one name can be stretched across tiers without losing its edge: Japanese custom work at the top, Asian factories below and a California shop between. Compare Schecter, the American maker that came under its founder’s ownership, and Ibanez, its long-time Japanese rival. For this guide we use black, a signal red and steel grey with an angular sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ESP’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.