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Mosrite
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osrite is an American guitar manufacturing company, based in Bakersfield, California, from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s. Founded by Semie Moseley, Mosrite guitars were played by many rock and roll and country artists such as Tommy Tedesco,Davie Allan, Kurt Cobain, Joe Maphis, Larry Collins, Buck Trent, Nick McCarthy, The Ventures, the MC5, Iron Butterfly, Arthur Lee Love, Johnny Ramone Kayama Yuzo, and Kevin Shields. A friend of Moseley, a singing preacher named Rev. Ray Boatright, was deeply impressed with Moseley's guitar designs, and put up front money for Moseley to found his guitar company.
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Mosrite is an American guitar manufacturing company, based in Bakersfield, California, from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s. Founded by Semie Moseley, Mosrite guitars were played by many rock and roll and country artists such as Tommy Tedesco,Davie Allan, Kurt Cobain, Joe Maphis, Larry Collins, Buck Trent, Nick McCarthy, The Ventures, the MC5, Iron Butterfly, Arthur Lee Love, Johnny Ramone Kayama Yuzo, and Kevin Shields. A friend of Moseley, a singing preacher named Rev. Ray Boatright, was deeply impressed with Moseley's guitar designs, and put up front money for Moseley to found his guitar company. In gratitude, Moseley named the company by combining his and Boatright's last names.
Mosrite guitars were known for innovative design, beautiful engineering, very thin, low-fretted and narrow necks, and extremely hot (high output) pickups. Moseley's design for the Ventures, known as the "Ventures Model" (later known as the "Mark I") was generally considered to be the flagship of the line, but all of his guitars bore his unmistakable touch. Mosrite also produced an unusual double-necked guitar, which was the type favored by Collins and Maphis; this design was also used by Nick Nastos, lead guitar player for Bill Haley & His Comets, during 1968.
Semie Moseley began building guitars in the Los Angeles area around 1952 or 1953. He began by apprenticing at the Rickenbacker factory, where he learned much of his guitar making skills from Roger Rossmeisl, a German immigrant who brought old-world luthier techniques into the modern electric guitar manufacturing process. One of the recognizable features on almost all Mosrites is the "German Carve" on the top that Moseley learned from Rossmeisl. Around the same time, Moseley apprenticed with Paul Bigsby in Downey, California, the man who made the first modern solid-body guitar for Merle Travis in 1948, and who invented the Bigsby vibrato tailpiece, which is still used today.
Moseley made guitars in Los Angeles until 1959, when he moved to Oildale, California, just north of Bakersfield. He moved his shop to Panama Lane in 1962 where he designed and produced the first Ventures Model guitars.
Though a genius at guitar design and construction, Moseley lacked many basic skills necessary to be a good businessman, and the company fell on hard times repeatedly in the late 1960s and 1970's, but continued to produce Mosrite guitars until 1993 in North Carolina and Arkansas. Most of them were exported to Japan, where their popularity remained very strong. The quality of the instruments always remained very respectable. Semie Moseley died in 1992. His wife Loretta continued to produce Mosrites a year or so after his death.
Kurt Cobain's Mosrite Gospel Guitar (one of only two 'Mark IV gospels', the other is owned by his daughter Michelle Moseley) was featured in an online auction in 2006 by Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, TX, fetching $131,450.00.
Mosrite has recently been restarted by Loretta in 2007 and since 2008 has been selling custom Mosrites via their website.
The company now has recently released the Semie Moseley Model ’63 and ’65, based on the Ventures models made in those two years. Both models are made to the exact specifications as the original models; they are 100% hand-made and were created to commemorate Semie Moseley.
Guitar Design
Vibramute Vibrato
Moseley designed his own hand vibrato units. The Vibramute consisted of a solid cast metal base, and a string stop connected to a vibrato arm lifted by a large spring. The bridge, also designed by Moseley, he called the Roller Matic bridge. Each string sat atop a raised post with individual string rollers. This allows for the tension between the string stop and bridge to stay equal to the tension between the bridge and nut which helps with guitar stay in tune and reduces string wear when using the tremolo. It is also ideally positioned for easy palm muting of the strings. Vibramute also had, as its name implies, a foam rubber string mute at the front, similar to the Fender Jaguar, but most players disliked it. That, in conjunction with many requests to lengthen the rather short vibrato handle, led Moseley to slightly re-design the unit for the 1965 and beyond guitars. He named this incarnation the "Moseley" vibrato, though its differences with the Vibramute are slight.
Body
The body of Mosrite guitars are shaped so that the lower horn of the body is longer than the upper. Many Mosrite Guitars have a beveled edge around the body called a "German carve". The Gospel models have a unique flat face body with rounded edges.
Neck
Mosrite necks are narrow and thin. They have thin, very low frets (sometimes called "speed frets") and a "zero fret" to set the string height near the headstock. The headstock has the outline of the letter "M" at the top.
Notable users
External links
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