Nobuhiro Mine: Guitar Guru and Surf Legend
Yamaha, Roland, Guyatone and a look at one of the Japanese guitar industry's (relatively) unsung heroes.
To say that we love a gear rabbit hole here at the Guitar Bar would be an understatement. Sure, the vintage Gibsons and Fenders are always a treat, but my personal favorites are the rarities, the oddballs, the pieces of gear so obscure that I struggle to find even one other example online.
We’ve got one such mystery in the shop right now:
You’re looking at a Guyatone EG-2100M, which came to the shop straight from Tokyo. Thank goodness, it came in with the hangtags; my cursory attempts at research proved largely unfruitful. After digging through my standard resources, I found a scant few Japanese retailers with previous listings and a Facebook post or two, but nothing with any concrete intel beyond the model name and a vague association with Nobuhiro Mine, whose signature was silkscreened on the peghead.
Nobuhiro Mine is best known for the Guyatone Sharp 5, which was his signature guitar in the ‘60s while playing with the band of the same. We were familiar enough with the Sharp 5 model, which is among the more significant Japanese surf guitars; as such, plenty of examples have made it over to the states, and the guitar has a cult celebrity in surf rock and Japanese guitar circles. However, our familiarity with Mine himself largely started and ended with those instrument and their ‘90s reissues.
However, we had no idea just how many classic Japanese guitars had direct ties to Mine.
I was initially fearful that there might not be enough concrete intel out there to merit an entire article. As the extent of Mine’s career and contributions became more clear, though, it became apparent that, if anything, I’d have too much to work with. Each discovery led to another, and a robust lineage of Mine-designed instruments began to take shape.
Nobuhiro Mine is still very much alive, very much still working on new music (which he releases on Facebook and YouTube), and has an active website with a listed email address.
I had sent out a Google-translated (poorly, without a doubt) email to that address, with little expectation that I would be hearing back. Imagine my surprise when, a little over a week later, I had a response for Mine-san himself waiting for me in my inbox. While our communication was somewhat stunted by the inevitable language barrier (Google Translate, after all, can only go so far), I was able to get some insight and confirmation of a few key milestones in his career.
First, Mine-san confirmed that he had assisted in the design of the Yamaha SG when he was a mere 19 years old, and that he had gone over to Guyatone at age 20, where he assisted in the design of the official Sharp 5 guitar.
In the decades since, Mine said he has been “sharing [his] know-how with various guitar companies,” and that he is largely interested in tone over aesthetics. As to the EG-2100M, Mine-san immediately recognized the rare oddball, and was quick to differentiate it from Gibson’s Chet Atkins CE. Mine’s nylon string classical-inspired electric has 22 frets (as opposed to the CE’s 19), designed to be more familiar to electric players, and noiseless performance via the undersaddle pickup.
“I think a guitar like this would be expensive these days,” he said. “Please take good care of it.”
A huge thanks to Mine-san for his assistance, and a big congratulations to him for a remarkably prolific career. With that said, here is a rough timeline of the life and achievements of Nobuhiro Mine, with particular attention paid to some of his most enduring creations.
There’s a strong argument to be made that Nobuhiro Mine is one of the most influential people in Japan to ever pick up an electric guitar. He’s been directly involved in the creation of several iconic models, and has been a fixture in the industry for more than six decades. While many of the artists he inspired may have eclipsed him in terms of crossover popularity, Mine’s fingerprints can be found across the entirety of the Japanese guitar world, from his pioneering designs to his musical legacy.
He started young: the son of legendary Japanese singer Dick Mine, Mine-san was born into the world of music. A true multi-instrumentalist, he started playing ukulele at just three years old, was a professional drummer by the age of fifteen, and led his first band (Blue Fire) as a guitarist at seventeen. It was his next group, Munetaka Inoue & His Sharp Five, that would catapult Mine to major success: trailblazers in the world of Japanese surf rock, the Sharp Five were an incredibly influential group during the initial explosion of the genre’s popularity, and Mine’s guitar was a big part of their success (those interested in learning more about Japan’s love of surf guitar and the Ventures-inspired “Eleki boom” of the 1960s can check out our article here).
Following up that success, Mine became a mainstay in the Japanese studio world as a session player, appearing on scores of recordings over the years. By the early ‘70s he was exceedingly well-established and in-demand as a studio hired gun, and was approached by Yamaha to assist with the design of their SG model, which was then in the early stages of development.
The Yamaha SG series of instruments were arguably the first to give Western guitarists an idea of the quality that Japanese luthiers could achieve, at least when it comes to unique designs. Lovingly referred to by those in the know as the “Les Paul Killer,” the Yamaha SG takes Gibson’s classic mahogany/maple tonewood combo and construction, augmenting it with forward-thinking design and premium cosmetic appointments (depending on the model tier). Widely associated with Carlos Santana, who also assisted in the model’s design and played an SG2000 extensively throughout the ‘70s, the Yamaha SG models are indelibly linked to the initial success of Japanese guitars in America.
With that success under his belt, Mine moved on to his next project. Throughout the late ‘60s, Mine and the other members of Sharp Five had played Guyatone instruments, most notably the LG-350, a heavily Mosrite-influenced guitar that essentially hybridized Semie Moseley’s classic Ventures model and the Fender Jaguar.
also drew heavily from Fender's Jaguar model with its vibrato tailpiece and distinctive "claw" surrounds on the single coil pickups.
About as surfy as a guitar can get, the LG-350 featured a Mosrite-esque funky offset-shaped body with a German carve paired with Jaguar-style vibrato and distinctive “claw” surrounds on the two single coil pickups. When Guyatone went bankrupt in ‘68, they emerged a few short years later as Guya Co., Ltd; naturally, the new version of the company wasn’t looking to reinvent the proverbial wheel, instead expanding on previous models with new, forward-thinking features.
The LG-350, as the previous Guyatone crown jewel, was ripe for a reimagining: designed in collaboration with Mine, Guyatone released the LG-350T. Far more than just a reissue, the LG-350T introduced an incredibly unique feature that has since appeared on a number of other models (including every single “Sharp 5” reissue since), with a third single coil pickup was added to the existing two. Instead of a standard Strat style configuration, however, the new middle pickup was wired to be engaged as a kind of thickening agent for the neck and bridge pickups, particularly potent when engaged with the bridge pickup as a kind of mock humbucker. The LG-350T predated Eddie Van Halen and the onset of the Superstrat by a handful of years, effectively offering nearly the same power as a bridge position humbucker or HSS configuration. And while the LG-350T was still intended as a surf guitar, its forward-thinking electronics were a real moment of foreshadowing for the electric guitar world.
The initial production run of the LG-350T was relatively limited, but the model would be rebranded as the Guyatone Sharp 5, boasting the same 2.5 pickup configuration (albeit with the middle pickup paired exclusively with the bridge single coil, usually controlled by a push/push faux coil split), rereleased and reissued several times over the years.
In the past several decades, Mine’s had a hand in the development of several instruments, many of them for Guyatone, but also other oddball gems like Roland’s pioneering GR-500 guitar synthesizer.
Alongside his prolific design career, Mine has remained highly active as a musician: he’s still releasing music to this day, and he has designed guitars as recently as the 2010s, including the oddball that first sent me down the depths of the Mine rabbit hole:
Produced to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Mine’s relationship with Guyatone, the EG-2100M is certainly a unique guitar, both visually and functionally. It’s a nylon string electric (not dissimilar to Gibson’s Chet Atkins CE in that regard) that features an active piezo undersaddle pickup and ornate marquetry, including extensive abalone purfling and a gorgeous bookmatched flame maple top. It’s a very rare model, with extremely few examples known to exist.
Mine is accessible through his website, email, and Facebook, and still releases music to this day on his YouTube channel. Too many legends and pioneers of the electric guitar world are no longer with us, but Mine’s lucky admirers can still actively pay their respects to the man himself. If you, like us, are an appreciator of the wonderful world of Japanese electric guitar, you are a fan of Nobuhiro Mine. Whether discussing about his own creations or those inspired (directly or indirectly) by him, it’s hard to imagine the Japanese electric guitar landscape without Mine-san’s contributions.
For more on the Sharp 5 and its myriad incarnations, we've got you covered over on YouTube:
-S.J. Feehan