SHIJIE was founded in 2015. The founder Alex Wong has actually accumulated this brand during the earlier period of manufacturing and his guitar maintenance work. The idea of ​​creating the brand comes from Alex’s understanding of the products of Chinese OEM guitar. Alex is a perfectionist. During the quality inspection career and repair work from 2006 to 2013, Alex has inspected and repaired a lot of guitars and accumulated a lot of experience . They have experienced problems and problems. Alex summed up these problems, and then decided to make a stable guitar that optimizes these problems.

In 2014, Alex established his own factory, and in 2015, Alex launched his own brand call SHIJIE, In the initial period of 2015-2019, SHIJIE was not in the form of mass production, but in the form of customization, and accompanied by OEM production of some high-quality guitars for global OEMs orders, and cooperated with California, Japan, Germany, etc. Well-known brands.

During the period when the production was mainly customized, he met the famous guitar designer J. Riboloff in 2015. Also benefited from the many technical support and help of JT, JT and they became a good friend. At the beginning of 2018, SHIJIE launched a comprehensive super ST model: the TM-6 model. In the same year, the TM-6 was highly praised and recognized in China. Starting from the second half of 2019, SHUIE decided to focus on mass production. Since the TM-6 model has been recognized and praised by the market, SHIJIE has launched a new generation of STE. In the same year, The new STE has been extremely popular in overseas markets. Good feedback and recognition, 2020 affected by COVID-19, Alex decided to suspend the custom production line and the OEM business production line, and then merge the custom staff and the mass production staff into one, focusing on the production of high-quality and inexpensive small-batch fine guitars of about $1,000.

In view of the success of STE, SHIJIE has launched a vintage-style TLV in early 2020. Now Alex and his younger brother Shilong still to personally inspect each guitar and testing before sending out.

“Does the guitar head block will also affect the sound of the guitar?” Even many members of the American Luthiers Association admitted in the 1970s that the close integration of the neck and the body could be ignored in the making of guitars, this will be a serious mistake.

Conventional guitar head block

The common head block of a folk guitar is inverted L-shaped and rectangular, which plays the role of splicing and reinforcing the connecting side plates. But there is a big difference between classical guitars and acoustic guitars.

The traditional Spanish-style handle of the classical guitar can better transmit the energy of the neck to the body because it has an integrated body connection head block, which is C-shaped. Compared with the inverted L-shape of the traditional tenon-and-mortise connection, it has a larger contact area on the backplate, which provides better stability, while reducing the energy attenuation from the neck to the body cavity. The additional physical function is to provide A larger connection area of the side panels (the stow in the Utopia guitar FCL’s sharp corners also plays this role), but it brings heavy craftsmanship and higher costs.

Utopia guitars head block

Utopia guitar is to combine tenon and tenon and Spanish way, the combination part is tenon and tenon, and the head block is the Spanish C type.

The problem to be noted is that to make the tenon and tenon joint tightly combined with the head block, it is necessary to ensure that when the slotting error is within 0.1mm, adjust the reasonable neck angle and reinforce it with the animal skin glue.

Facts have proved that this is an effective way to reasonably control the cost while ensuring the energy conductivity from the neck to the body.

The head block at the Utopia guitar is made of African mahogany. It has excellent mid- and low-frequency response characteristics. The tone is direct but not sharp. It can add more direct feedback to the overall resonance, and the mid- and low-frequency tone is more transparent, brings a comfortable and quiet feeling to the player.