Takamine

The house lights go down and the excitement level goes up until it’s almost off the charts.

Just as the stage lights come on, the first familiar guitar hook of “Take it Easy” sings clearly through the PA and the Eagles lift off on another flight to a hotel in California and back. The guitar in the hands of Glenn Frey is the same one that he’s played for nearly 20 years. It’s a Takamine known to the crew as simply, “Glenn #1.”

The family tree of Glenn Frey’s Takamine extends back to an actual Sitka spruce tree deep in the interior of Canada.

Around 1980, the tree that was to produce the top for Glenn’s guitar - plus a few hundred other Takamine instruments - began a long and slow trip from forest to sawmill to kiln and then to a drying shed in the shadow of Mount Takamine in Japan.



Far from the stage lights and 50-kilowatt PA of a rock arena, the spruce - now a bookmatched top set - rested for three years, acclimating itself to the environment and relieving its internal stresses. When it was selected by Takamine inspectors to become the top for an EG360S model, it moved through the building process to become serial number 91072458 in 1991.