A firm founded for expelled violin makers.

Framus was founded in Erlangen, in Bavaria, on 1 January 1946, as the Fränkische Musikinstrumentenerzeugung Fred A. Wilfer KG, according to the company’s own history and German Wikipedia. The name is a contraction — FRAnconian MUSical instruments — chosen, English Wikipedia says, to show that the violin makers of Schönbach had made Franconia their new home.

Its founder, Fred Wilfer, was born in 1917 in the Bohemian part of the Musikwinkel, the instrument-making district on the border of Bohemia and Saxony, near the violin town of Schönbach — today Luby, in the Czech Republic. After the Second World War, when the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia was being expelled, Wilfer approached the Bavarian authorities with a plan to resettle Schönbach’s instrument makers in Bavaria, and, the company says, the Bavarian government asked him to prepare the ground. The first transport of Schönbach makers reached Erlangen in March 1946.

The firm moved several times. The company dates its first workshop, in a former labour-service camp at Möhrendorf north of Erlangen, to the autumn of 1946; German Wikipedia gives March 1948. At the end of 1948 production moved to a former brewery in Baiersdorf, and from 1949 the village of Bubenreuth became the centre of the Schönbach settlement. In the summer of 1954 Framus moved into a new factory there, with 2,200 square metres of floor space and 170 instrument makers. The company says they made 2,000 instruments a month; German Wikipedia says about 200, so the figure is uncertain. Framus is often called a Bubenreuth firm, but it began in Erlangen and reached Bubenreuth eight years later.

Star Bass, Hootenanny and Zenith.

Violins came first, but guitars soon overtook them. As rock and roll and then the Beatles created a boom, Framus opened a second plant at Pretzfeld, in Franconian Switzerland. The company says that by 1966 it had become the largest guitar factory in Europe, with more than 300 employees; German Wikipedia dates the Pretzfeld branch to 1967–1977. For decades its export instruments carried a label inside the body reading “Built in the Heart of Bavaria,” and in the 1950s it advertised itself as “Framus – ein Weltbegriff,” a household name around the world.

Musicians carried that name abroad. The company’s history names the guitarist Billy Lorento, later known as the pickup designer Bill Lawrence, as its longest relationship, followed by the jazz guitarist Attila Zoller and the German rock-and-roll singer Peter Kraus, for whom Framus built an easy-to-play four-string guitar. In 1964 Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones signed a three-year endorsement for the Star Bass. The Dutch guitarist Jan Akkerman received a signature model in 1974, the company says.

Two Beatles connections are better documented than most. Paul McCartney’s first guitar was a Zenith Model 17, a model the guitarist Ivor Mairants had Framus build for sale by Boosey & Hawkes; he swapped a trumpet for it, English Wikipedia says, citing Barry Miles’s biography Many Years From Now. John Lennon owned a Framus Hootenanny twelve-string from 1965, which he played in the film Help!. On 29 May 2024 the BBC reported that the guitar, found in an attic after being presumed lost for more than 50 years, had sold at Julien’s Auctions for $2.9 million, the highest price paid for a Beatles instrument at auction.

The factory also ran a musical kindergarten from 1954, where Gertrud Fischer taught children from the age of three using coloured “note men.” Wilfer’s motto, as the company quotes it, was that a maker must not only produce instruments but also, in the long run, “produce customers.”

The end is less clear. Framus went bankrupt and its archive was almost entirely lost, so the date is uncertain: English Wikipedia gives 1975, the company’s museum page says the mid-1970s, its history page says the end of the 1970s, and German Wikipedia says production stopped in the early 1980s. The causes the company names are internal and financial problems and competition from Japan.

Design and documentation.

The seven European and Japanese guitar brands in this guide have been owned and run in different ways: some are one-maker workshops, some sit inside larger music groups, and one has stopped trading.

In Germany, Framus was founded by Fred Wilfer in Erlangen in 1946 and went bankrupt in the later 1970s — sources differ on the year; his son Hans-Peter Wilfer revived the name in 1995 as part of Warwick, in Markneukirchen, English Wikipedia says. In Sweden, Hagstrom began in 1925 as Albin Hagström’s accordion business and made guitars at Älvdalen from 1958; the brand returned in the mid-2000s, and its website today is published by Musik Meyer of Marburg, Germany, its European distributor. In Finland, Ruokangas, founded by the luthier Juha Ruokangas in 1995, has worked from Harviala manor in Janakkala since 2011 and is solely owned by him, English Wikipedia says.

In France, LAG was founded in Toulouse in 1981 by Michel Chavarria and has belonged since 2002 to Algam of Thouaré-sur-Loire, near Nantes, French Wikipedia says.

In Japan, Tokai Gakki was founded in 1947 and is based in Hamamatsu, according to its website; English Wikipedia says the Grace Company bought it in 2021. Aria grew from Shiro Arai’s Nagoya trading company of 1956, Arai & Co. Fernandes, founded in 1969, stopped trading in July 2024, and a Tokyo court opened bankruptcy proceedings in July 2025, Tokyo Shoko Research reported.

Where the guitars are made varies too — French Wikipedia says LAG’s entry-level and mid-range guitars come from China and South Korea — and the makers do not always say.

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.

“Built in the Heart of Bavaria.”

The revival came through the founder’s son. Hans-Peter Wilfer founded the bass maker Warwick in Erlangen in 1982, and in 1995 moved the company to Markneukirchen, in the Saxon Vogtland — the German side of the same Musikwinkel his father’s makers had left — and brought back the Framus name, English and German Wikipedia say. Framus is now a brand of the privately held Warwick GmbH & Co Music Equipment KG, whose name appears on both Framus websites; English Wikipedia names Hans-Peter Wilfer as owner. So Framus is a revived name, not a continuous company: about two decades separate the bankrupt Bubenreuth works from the Saxon brand.

Where the guitars are made depends on the tier. The company says its Custom Shop Masterbuilt instruments are built by its luthiers, and that its Pro Series Teambuilt guitars — Diablo II, Panthera II, Mayfield and a Devin Townsend model — are made “in the same factory,” giving “German built quality.” Its cheaper D-Series, the Breaker and Shark lines, is different: “All instruments are quality checked in China and again by our German luthiers before shipping,” the company says, which points to production outside Germany. German Wikipedia adds that the Markneukirchen operation has worked under the European Union’s EMAS environmental scheme since 2011 and generates much of its own power.

The old company has its own memorial. A Framus Museum opened in Markneukirchen in July 2007, German Wikipedia says, with more than 200 instruments from 1946 to the end of the 1970s, from violins to the Star Bass; when we checked in October 2026, the company’s archive site said it was closed until further notice. The historian Christian Hoyer’s history of the firm, published by Framus in 2007, covers 1946 to 1977.

For a design guide, Framus shows how a postwar refugee workshop became a brand worth reviving. Compare Warwick, the bass maker that revived it, and Hagstrom, another European guitar name brought back decades after its factory closed. For this guide we use walnut, cream and a sunburst amber with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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