A pedal-steel player’s workbench in California.

Hipshot began with one musician’s workbench. The company says Dave Borisoff founded it in 1982 “in a small industrial unit in California,” at a time when he was assembling electric buses by day and playing pedal steel at night, and building hardware for his bandmates on the side. The Seneca County Industrial Development Agency, in a case study on the firm, gives the same year and says Borisoff, a machinist as well as a musician, started the business when he “found himself in the shop more often than on stage.” The Ithaca Times, profiling the company in 2015, gave the year as 1983 and placed the first shop in Van Nuys, in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, so we note both dates.

The first product gave the company its name. It was a string bender for Telecaster-style guitars: a lever, pushed with the player’s hip, that raised the pitch of the B string, borrowing a pedal-steel sound. The company says this is where “Hipshot” comes from. Wikipedia’s article on B-benders notes that the Hipshot unit, “developed by David Borisoff,” mounts at the tailpiece end of the guitar without modifying it, and that Will Ray of the Hellecasters used one. Hipshot’s own product page says the bender fixes to a Telecaster with the existing strap-button screw.

The second invention was for a bass player in the same band: a tuning key with a lever that drops the low E string to D and back. Hipshot now sells it as the Xtender. It became so common that, Wikipedia notes, bassists often call any detuner a “Hipshot” or a “D-tuner,” and that Leland Sklar’s much-recorded “Frankenstein” bass carried a prototype Hipshot detuner.

In 1994 Borisoff moved what the agency calls “the then three-man Hipshot operation” from Van Nuys to Interlaken, a village between Cayuga and Seneca lakes in New York’s Finger Lakes, where his wife’s family lived. The Ithaca Times reported that the building he bought on the main road through the village had been an egg-processing plant. The polishing manager it interviewed in 2015, Gabriel Lopez, had been hired in Los Angeles around 1984 and moved east with the firm.

Bridges, tuners and a solar-powered plant.

The Interlaken plant grew in stages. The county agency says it made several low-interest loans that helped Borisoff buy the building and add CNC machines, each costing $40,000 to $150,000. In 2015 the Ithaca Times counted about 18,000 square feet of usable space and 36 employees, and quoted Borisoff saying about 30 percent of sales went overseas. The agency’s case study later gave 48 staff; the company now describes “a 43 person team of machinists, inventors and musicians,” with CNC mills and industrial lasers. It also says nine banks of solar panels at the factory produce 200 kilowatts, with surplus power fed into the grid.

The range now runs well beyond the first two inventions: fixed and multi-scale bridges, the BabyGrand and Tone-A-Matic guitar bridges (in 2015 Borisoff told the Ithaca Times a Tune-o-matic replacement was nearly ready), the MassKicker bass bridges, headless systems, tremolos, the Tremsetter, and tuning machines including the lightweight Ultralite bass tuner. Hipshot also says it now produces the Parsons/Green StringBender, the bender Gene Parsons first built for Clarence White, “to Gene’s exacting specifications.”

Much of this goes onto other companies’ instruments. The county agency says Hipshot has supplied Peavey, Fender, Cort and Yamaha as well as boutique builders. Wikipedia records Hipshot Ultralite tuners on Fender’s American Deluxe basses from 2006, Hipshot lightweight vintage-style tuners on the 2008 American Standard Jazz Bass, and a Hipshot Tremsetter on the Strat Plus of 1987 to 1999.

Where the parts are made needs care. The company stresses its New York factory and “good old fashioned American labor,” and its 1998 website said “Made in the USA since 1982.” But its current product pages mark many items “Made in Korea,” among them the Grip-Lock and Classic guitar tuning machines and the TransTone and MassKicker bass bridges. The MassKicker Solo page says it is crafted with a Korean manufacturing partner, with final assembly and quality control in New York. The USA Ultralite bass tuner is labelled “Made in the USA.” In the sources we checked we found no sale of the business: the county agency names Borisoff as president and chief executive.

Design and documentation.

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 new tradition in bass and guitar hardware.

Hipshot’s identity rests on its name, which describes a movement, and on its products more than on any visual system. The company publishes no logo guidelines, typefaces or colour values that we could find. Its tagline is “The new tradition in bass and guitar hardware,” and its mission statement says electric guitar and bass design “doesn’t have to be locked into a bygone era,” and that the aim is “to create the next golden age.” The county agency quotes an unofficial motto: “If you want it, we’ll learn to make it.”

The product names carry much of the voice: Xtender, Grip-Lock, MassKicker, QuickLoad, Riverstone, DoubleShot. They describe what each part does, and the company says several are patented; the agency credits Borisoff with about eight patents. The rest of the brand sits in the hardware itself, polished brass and machined aluminium, and in the way “Hipshot” became bass players’ shorthand for a drop-tuner lever.

For a design guide, Hipshot shows how a name taken from a player’s gesture can become a whole category’s word, and how a company can talk about tradition while selling change. Compare Gotoh, the Japanese tuner maker, and Sperzel, the Cleveland maker of locking tuners. For this guide we use lake navy, machined-aluminium grey and a solar amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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