Burns London
| Private | |
| Industry | Musical instruments |
| Founded | 1959 |
| Founder | James Ormston Burns, Alice Louise Farrell |
| Headquarters | London, England |
|
Area served
|
Global |
| Products |
Electric guitars Bass guitars |
| Website | Burns London Ltd |
Burns is an English manufacturer of electric guitars and bass guitars, founded by Alice Louise Farrell (1908–1993) and James Ormston (Jim) Burns (1925–1998) in 1959. The company was first named Burns-Weill, then renamed Ormston Burns Ltd. At its peak, in the 1960s, it was the most successful guitar company in England.
Ormston Burns Ltd. was bought up by Baldwin Piano Company in 1965, and the company was renamed Baldwin-Burns. Burns guitars were reintroduced in 1991 under the name Burns London, and the product line now includes a collector's edition of the first model the company produced.
Jim Burns set out to make, in his own words, "mass produced one-offs", such as the Marvin, a radical take on the style with many more differences than it is generally credited with. The Bison, now considered a classic, combined fewer Fender influences with a shorter scale length of 25 inches, and the "Wild Dog" electronics, allowing the high-output Tri-Sonic pickups to be selected in many different, and sometimes unusual, combinations. Burns had a proprietary vibrato system, which was used also on Gretsch guitars.
The original guitars made many showbiz friends, and were seen in the hands of some high-profile performers of the time, such as Elvis Presley, Hank Marvin and Jimmy Page, and were quite popular since they were much cheaper than US brands such as Fender and Gibson, helped also by import tariffs that made it expensive to buy US-made guitars in Britain.
Jim Burns' first commercial foray into electric guitar making came in 1958 when he designed and built the "Ike Isaacs Short Scale Model" for the Supersound Company. His Burns London name and company changed hands several times during the course of the 1960s and '70s, all the while retaining the Burns London moniker. The timing of the establishment of Burns London was perfect, with the British guitar market experiencing a huge boom, in part thanks to the popularity of British pop bands like The Shadows, and again thanks to the high tariffs on US-made goods. Even Ampeg, a relatively well-known brand, bought the license to manufacture guitars under the Burns moniker, most probably for the US market, though these were not a commercial success.
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Wikipedia