Jolana
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Jolana was a brand for Czechoslovak electric guitars and basses from around 1959 to 1989 .
history
The production of electric guitars in Czechoslovakia began in 1953 when Josef Ružička took over the management of the Resonet plant in Blatné . The first electric guitar built by Resonet was a lap steel model called Akord, which was followed by the Arioso in 1955 . An electric double bass called the Arco was also produced.
At that time, the first electric guitars without a resonance body (solid body) were already being accepted by the market in the USA , and so a solid body model was also designed at Resonet. This guitar called Grazioso was conceptually based on the Fender Stratocaster , but was not a copy. Rather, Leo Fender's ideas were used as a starting point for our own solutions; Details such as the vibrato system were even a complete in-house development. The Grazioso was a great success - not only in Czechoslovakia. So it was exported in large quantities to Great Britain during the late 1950s , where there was an import ban on US goods at the time. The British importer Selmer sold the instrument under the name Futurama, and it became the entry-level instrument for some later British superstars such as George Harrison and Jimmy Page .
Between 1959 and 1960 guitar production was relocated to the new Neoton factory in Hradec Králové and the Grazioso was replaced by the simplified Star and Star III models , which were exported to Great Britain until 1963 as Futurama II and Futurama III . Due to the deterioration in quality, the demand for the export of these new guitars gradually decreased and marketing increasingly concentrated on the countries of the Eastern Bloc . Soon the guitars produced by Neoton were sold under the brand name Jolana .
In order to be able to satisfy the demand for electric guitars and basses, which increased explosively in the countries of the Eastern Bloc as a result of the beat boom in the early 1960s, two further plants were soon built in Horovice (from 1962) and Krnov (from 1965) Jolana instruments produced.
Production ended in turning -time 1989. The Company NBE Corporation (New Bohemian Electric Corporation) was founded in the 1999th The production of electric string instruments began in Drozdov two years later. First it was double basses for NS Design from the USA and later bass guitars from Spector. The Jolana brand has been around since 2001.
NBE sells products of the following brands in the Czech Republic and in some other European countries: Spector, NS Design, Schaller, WD, ESP, Ashdown, TECH 21.
Models
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The peculiarity of some models is that the same body was used for guitar and bass , which reduced production costs. In this case, however, the two versions differ in the scaling of the neck and the specific hardware .
Chord Graziela special II Basso V Special Neotone Ruby (1) Marina Kolorbas Basora Studio (1) Alexandra Diamond (1) Alexis II onyx Basso IV Vicomt (1) Pedro Iris (1) Star VII Altro Sirius Superstar (1) star Disco (1) Big beat Galaxy (1) Hurricane Jantar (1) treble D bass Alfa Strat Star IX Proxima (1) Basso IX RK120 Basso X RK140 tornado RK bass
Horovice 1 guitar and bass
