History of Ibanez guitars started in 1908 when Hoshino Gakki, a Japanese music distributor and sales company was founded in Nagoya, Japan. In 1929, Hoshino Gakki began importing high-end classical guitars from a Spanish guitar builder, Salvador Ibanez. The brand name was “Ibanez Salvador” and later simply called “Ibanez”.

Furthermore, Hoshino Gakki decided in 1935 to produce Spanish-style acoustic guitars, then later on bought the Ibanez guitar company and obtained the rights to the Ibanez name.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s Hoshino began importing their guitars to the United States. The guitars were high-quality replicas of the famous American guitar brands such as Fender, Gibson and others. With the better professional craftmanship and lower price, the copies of Stratocaster and Les Paul models from Ibanez quickly becoming very popular, coincided with the declining build quality from US guitar makers at the time.

The golden era of Ibanez replica guitars finally ended when Gibson’s parent company, Norlin, brought the lawsuit against Horino. The suit was settled out of court in 1978. This became known as the Ibanez “Lawsuit Era” and the most famous lawsuit in guitar business history.

But aside from this turmoil Ibanez still had excellent reputation from professional musicians. Paul Stanley from KISS played the Iceman model during the 1970’s. George Benson’s signature models and Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir with Artist model represented the Ibanez high quality made. Edward Van Halen from Van Halen is also said to have used the customized “Shark” Destroyer on the first three Van Halen albums by the end of 70’s and early 80’s.