BY DESIGN

Yamaha’s rev’d up models were designed to serve the player

As we reported back in issue 402, Yamaha invested considerable time and money in the design of the Revstar range. South London design company, forpeople, began fleshing out the design ethos and periodically invited players, dealers and even journalists like ourselves to pass comment on progress. The key elements were based on Yamaha’s half-century of electric guitar making, concepts of contemporary Japanese youth and craft culture, alongside a motorcycle inspiration – Yamaha started making motorbikes back in 1955. The Café Racerstyle influence came early in the process of what was to become Revstar: “a classic guitar that we’ve tuned up”, said Yamaha. As the months passed, the concepts increased and more evaluations took place in the UK, Europe and the USA.

In January 2015, we saw the first 3D samples, by which time, of course, Yamaha’s designers and engineers were involved in taking the design concepts and turning them into viable instruments for production. The primary designer of the new guitars, Piotr Stolarski, was – like forpeople – an instrument-design ‘virgin’. He relocated from Poland to Hamamatsu in Japan, and Revstar was his first design task for Yamaha.

“To me, as a designer, lots of guitars seem to be created by trying to make the ‘perfect’ instrument in the taste of the sole maker,” said Piotr at the time. “Our process was a lot more democratic. The main problem we faced was to create something original but not freakish – people want old guitars, they don’t want new guitars.”

And while Revstar draws on designs from Yamaha’s past, “this is part of our future, not a reissue of our past,” stated Julian Ward, Yamaha’s guitar product planning manager, at the time. “But that’s not to say the new design couldn’t be the guitar we never made, for example, in 1973.”