James Tyler Guitars Japan

If you want to order a special guitar from the japanese line the build time is about 3 months from ordering.

PRICELIST 2020

The James Tyler Japan project has been spearheaded and managed by Daisuke Kitahara, who owns and operates Kitahara Gakki, inc., our official Japanese distributor since 2006. Daisuke is a good friend of James Tyler, and they've been business associates for over twenty-five years. Daisuke attended Berklee college of music in the early ’80s and has been playing jtg guitars for years. Daisuke knows good guitars and he
knows JTG.

Daisuke first approached James Tyler three years ago about developing a lower price tyler line for the Japanese market, and James told him to go ahead and run with it. Daisuke then spent the next year researching, looking at factories, and interviewing the factory owners throughout Japan until he found a factory that would build the guitars the way we wanted, instead of them telling us how we should do it.

Daisuke settled on Aska located in Nagano. one of the owners from Aska came to los angeles and spent time with James Tyler at his shop observing and learning his processes. James gave them his computer cad models so they could build the guitars exactly the same as we do. Aska then spent the next year tooling up, building prototypes and dialing in the studio elite and classic models. They have dedicated an area of the factory and specific employees to build these guitars exclusively. Several of the Aska craftsmen also came to our Los Angeles shop and spent time learning how we do things.

This started out as a line that was only going to sell in Japan, but after James saw the first production models, he thought it made sense to sell worldwide.

"When I first opened the cases of the final prototypes and held the guitars, it completely creeped me out. I couldn't tell the difference between these guitars and the USA guitars built here in Los Angeles. I've shown these guitars to a few of my best dealers worldwide, and they are all completely blown away. We are starting out with conservative production numbers and will increase slowly over time to keep the quality high." - James Tyler

This new mid-price line of guitars has already been selling in Japan since 2014 and is doing very well, and we are now ready to expand to our dealers around the world.  

James with a Tyler Japan.