A radio workshop in Feucht.

Schaller began as a one-man radio workshop. The company says Helmut Schaller (1923–1999), who had trained as a toolmaker at Diehl in Nuremberg and specialised in high-frequency technology during the war, set up at the end of 1945, aged 22, in a nine-square-metre workshop in an old farmhouse in Feucht, near Nuremberg. It says he qualified as a master radio mechanic in 1946 and added a shop selling radios and electrical goods in 1948. German Wikipedia spells his first name Helmuth; the company uses Helmut.

The move into music came through a neighbour’s guitars. Fred Wilfer, expelled from Schönbach in the Sudetenland (today Luby in the Czech Republic), had founded Framus in 1946, and a settlement for Schönbach’s instrument makers grew up at Bubenreuth, about 20 km north of Nuremberg, the company says. It says Wilfer persuaded Schaller in the early 1950s to develop amplifiers and pickups exclusively for Framus, and it quotes a 1957 Framus press release describing the guitar maker’s electro-acoustics department as run by “Fa. Radio Schaller.” English Wikipedia, citing Christian Hoyer’s 2007 history of Framus, says that by 1953 Schaller was making pickups and switches for Framus at Feucht. Schaller’s electronics went into Framus’s “Hollywood” electric guitars, and the loudspeaker and amplifier business traded as Schaller Electronic.

Other German makers followed, among them Höfner, Hopf and Hoyer, and the company says even East Germany bought Schaller parts with scarce hard currency for its guitar makers in Markneukirchen.

Machine heads from 1966.

Hardware followed electronics. Schaller added tremolos in 1961, bridges in 1962 and machine heads in 1966, according to the company and English Wikipedia. Its M6 tuner, the company says, was the world’s first fully enclosed, self-locking precision machine head; English Wikipedia repeats the claim, citing a 1967 trade-fair review in Das Musikinstrument. The company says Ovation, Gibson and Martin were using Schaller tuners from 1967 and that Fender switched to them in 1976; German Wikipedia, citing Tony Bacon and Paul Day’s The Fender Book (1992), says Fender used Schaller tuners from 1976 until 1983. In 1968 the firm left Feucht for a new factory at Postbauer-Heng, about 17 km south-east of Nuremberg in the Upper Palatinate, where it remains. The 1970s brought M4 bass tuners, Tune-o-matic-style bridges for Gibson guitars and more pickups.

Two products tied Schaller to the 1980s. The company says the American inventor Floyd Rose came to it in 1977 with the idea for a double-locking tremolo, which was developed in a three-month joint workshop and produced by Schaller from 1980. Wikipedia’s Floyd Rose article tells it differently: Rose’s first patent was granted in 1979, the Japanese firm Fernandes was the first contracted supplier from 1981, and production moved to Schaller by the end of 1983. The other product was the strap lock. The company says it developed and patented its Security Locks in 1981; the German patent cited by German Wikipedia, credited to Helmut Schaller, was filed in August 1979. The company calls the locks its best-selling product, and German Wikipedia, citing Terry Burrows’ Les Paul Manual (2015), says Fender, Dunlop and Ernie Ball copied the principle. Schaller stopped making loudspeakers, amplifiers and reverb units in the early 1980s to concentrate on metal parts.

Hardware 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.

A German factory under new ownership.

The family era ended at the turn of the century. After Helmut Schaller’s death in 1999, the company says, the business was run by his heirs together with his widow, Grete Schaller, without lasting new products. In August 2006 it was converted from a partnership into a GmbH and Dr Lars Bünning was appointed managing director; in January 2009 he took over the family’s shares and has since run it as managing partner, the company says, a chronology German Wikipedia follows. English Wikipedia dates the share transfer to December 2006 in one passage and to 2009 in another. From 2007 the company concentrated on guitar hardware, it says, and in 2016 it changed its name from Schaller Electronic to Schaller GmbH; it stopped making electromagnetic pickups in 2017.

Today’s range includes the GrandTune and M6 tuners, the Signum and Hannes bridges, the LockMeister tremolo and the S-Locks, a 2018 redesign of the Security Locks. The company says all its products are made at its Postbauer-Heng works by about 65 employees, and that it sells both to guitar makers and directly to musicians. German Wikipedia, citing Guitar World, Guitar.com and Yahoo reports of 2022 and 2023, notes that reissues of famous instruments — Gibson’s Kirk Hammett 1979 Flying V, Gretsch’s “The Beast” Jet for Malcolm Young of AC/DC and Fender’s Jerry Garcia “Alligator” Stratocaster — were fitted with Schaller tuners like the originals. Its own history page also quotes the English jazz guitarist Ivor Mairants, writing in 1980, that Schaller’s geared machine heads “were giving Grover machine heads a very good run and, in fact, overtaking them.”

For a design guide, Schaller shows how a parts maker can carry its name on other companies’ instruments, stamped on the back of a tuner or the side of a strap button. Compare Fender, which fitted Schaller tuners for years, and Grover, the American tuner maker it challenged. For this guide we use black, satin chrome and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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