A banjo player with more than fifty patents.

The Grover name goes back to a musician. Albert Deane Grover (1865–1927), born in Boston, was a banjoist, composer and teacher, and a founding member of the Boston Ideal Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar Club, an ensemble formed in 1887, according to Wikipedia. His father, Stephen Grover, was a Boston piano maker. Grover published Grover’s Progressive Method for the Banjo through Thompson & Odell of Boston in 1892, and he was a prolific inventor: Wikipedia, citing Philip Gura and James Bollman’s history of the nineteenth-century banjo, credits him with more than 50 patents for instrument parts.

He turned those inventions into a business, A. D. Grover & Son, which made accessories for fretted instruments. The present company says the firm was established in the late 1800s and that among its first products were machine heads for guitar and banjo, followed by tuners for other fretted instruments and for the violin. Grover died in Manhattan in 1927. The business later traded as Grover Accessories Co., and Joseph Spann’s Spann’s Guide to Gibson 1902–1941, cited by Wikipedia, places the next change after the death of Walter Grover.

That change came from Cleveland. In 1952 the Grover business was bought by the Grossman family’s music company, and the Cleveland firm took the name Grover Musical Products. Wikipedia gives 1952 as the founding date of the company in its present form; the company itself dates its history to 1922, the year its parent business began.

The Grossman brothers of Cleveland.

That parent business was a wholesaler. The company says Henry and Julius Grossman founded the Grossman Brothers Music Company in Cleveland in 1922, selling instruments and accessories from West 2nd Street, and that their brother-in-law Max Berger and his son Joseph Berger soon joined the sales side. The firm moved to larger premises in 1923 and again in 1925.

Manufacturing began with a toy. In 1949, the company says, Grossman acquired a local moulder, Trophy Plastics, to make the Flutophone, a one-octave instrument for children; the moulder became the Trophy Music Company, which went on to make recorders, kazoos and other classroom and novelty instruments. In 1955 Grossman bought Rogers Drums and moved it to Covington, Ohio, where it developed the Dyna-Sonic snare drum; Wikipedia’s history of Rogers gives the same purchase year and says CBS bought the drum maker in 1966. Wikipedia’s Grover article dates Henry Grossman’s ownership of Rogers from 1953, so the sources differ by two years.

Grover itself grew through acquisitions. In September 1965 it bought the Oliver T. Knode Co. of Richmond, Indiana, a maker of banjo and guitar accessories, and in December 1965 it bought the Nick Lucas guitar pick line from Mills Music, according to reports in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer cited by Wikipedia. Later additions included the Clevelander Drum Company, a maker of mallets bought in 1998, the company says. In March 2025 the group, which now calls itself Grover/Trophy, said it had acquired Wuhan cymbals and gongs and Attack drumheads from Cardinal Percussion. Its headquarters moved to Midwest Avenue in Cleveland in 2013, and the company says it is run by the fourth generation of the Berger family; Wikipedia names Richard I. Berger as president and Dann Skutt as vice president.

Tuners as a design register.

The seven brands here make the hardware that keeps a guitar in tune: tuning machines, bridges and nuts. Three are tuner names with long histories. Grover’s machine heads come from a Cleveland company that took the name in 1952, when the Grossman family’s firm bought A. D. Grover & Son; English Wikipedia says it designs and imports its tuners. Kluson, founded as John Kluson’s Chicago machine shop in 1925, folded in 1981; WD Music Products of Florida revived the brand in 1994, and English Wikipedia says its tuners are now made in Korea. Schaller, founded by Helmut Schaller in 1945 and based at Postbauer-Heng near Nuremberg, has been owned by Lars Bünning since 2009 and says its hardware is “Made in Germany.”

Two American makers stress their factories. Sperzel says it has made tuning keys since 1977, from parts made in its own Cleveland factory. Hipshot says Dave Borisoff founded it in California in 1982 with a B-string bender worked from the hip; now based in Interlaken, New York, it makes tuners, bridges and detuners.

Floyd Rose is a bridge and a company. Floyd D. Rose began work on his locking tremolo in 1976 and patented it in 1979; English Wikipedia says Schaller made the Original in Germany from 1983 to 2024. The company says it is a division of AP International Music Supply and that its 1000 Series is made in Korea.

Graph Tech began with the nut. Founded in Vancouver in 1983 by Dave Dunwoodie around a self-lubricating nut, it makes TUSQ nuts and saddles and, since 2013, Ratio tuners, and says it ships from its own factory in Vancouver.

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.

The sealed tuner and its rivals.

Grover’s best-known product is the Rotomatic, a tuner with its gears sealed in a lubricated housing. The company says the “world famous enclosed Rotomatic models were developed” under the new Cleveland management after 1952, and Wikipedia’s history of the Gibson Les Paul Custom says that by 1958 Gibson had replaced that guitar’s Kluson tuners with Grover Rotomatics. The current 102 series has a 14:1 gear ratio and fits a standard 10 mm post hole, and the company has reissued the early “milk bottle” Rotomatic housing of the 1960s and 1970s with an 18:1 ratio. Older open-gear designs live on in the Sta-Tite range, with a stamped plate and a “butter bean” button, and in the Imperial, both sold as vintage-style replacements.

The Rotomatic had competition. Schaller of Germany, which began making machine heads in 1966, quotes the English jazz guitarist Ivor Mairants writing in his 1980 memoir that Schaller’s tuners “were giving Grover machine heads a very good run and, in fact, overtaking them.”

Where the tuners are made is less clear than the history. Wikipedia describes Grover as a company that “designs, imports, and distributes” tuners. The company calls Grover a manufacturer, says it sells through dealers and to instrument makers rather than directly to players, and offers a lifetime warranty on its tuners, but the pages we checked do not name a country of manufacture. It also sells G2 by Grover, an economy line it says was developed primarily for the Chinese domestic market and is marked “G2” or “Grover” in upper-and-lower-case lettering. One domain note: grover.com belongs to an unrelated German electronics-rental company; the tuner maker’s site is grotro.com.

For a design guide, Grover shows how a component brand can become part of other makers’ instruments, its name read on the back of a headstock rather than the front. Compare Gibson, whose Les Paul Custom carried Rotomatics, and Schaller, the German rival. For this guide we use navy, chrome and nickel with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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