Howard, just to add to that, what I've read and heard from some close friends of Lloyd Baggs was that Takamine started manufacturing guitars with that exact L.R. Baggs headstock shape. This occurred right after Martin's attorneys had sent them a "Cease And Desist" letter regarding the so-called "Lawsuit Takamine" Martin copies.
The settlement that Lloyd and Takamine came to is that they sent him a quantity of their proprietary integral bridge/saddle pickups - ten or twelve of them, not an enormous number.
Once Lloyd got his hands on those, he thought: "Hmmm...I could make something like this" and then proceeded to do so. That was the origin of the LR Baggs LB6 pickup, which is still in the Baggs product line to this day. The prototype mountain dulcimer pickup that I have in my main stage dulcimer is simply a scaled-down version of the LB6, and it's still going strong after more than 25 years of active use.
All that aside, the Cooder guitar shown in the photos in the first post in this thread is not the same model that Takamine built for Ry Cooder. So does anyone have any further information about Cooder Guitars as a separate Takamine product line?
Wade Hampton Miller
|