Kay Unknown Acoustic

This was a very pretty guitar when it was new in 1974. I have done some research and have yet to find a Kay with the fancy looks of this one. The body is a dark brown color with a black tailpiece and white plastic bridge all in one (typical of 1974 Kays). It has a round sticker with Kay on the headstock. The exceptional features on this are the 2 black pick guards with designs on them simular to a Gibson Hummingbird. The back of the guitar is a very dark brown with black scrolling that is imprinted into the wood. This is something I have never seen on a guitar before. This guitar seems to be much fancier than a typical Kay. Still a Kay in quality overall. Any information on this guitar would be much appreciated.

My first and favorite. Not a great sound but always brings back memories when played.

This guitar has the plastic bridge and cheap keys of a 1974 Kay. The finish was exceptional and very good looks. I have received many comments on just how nice this guitar looks.

Withstood my childhood but it has since started to come apart. Face is pulling loose and the neck has a slight bow to it. The keys still work but some are very hard. A typical import Kay.

Overall, I am most impressed by the fancy looks of this guitar. Was a great first guitar and I hope to someday restore it since it was my first. It is not the best guitar I have but in many ways it is my favorite.

I really dont know where this guitar was made. im guessing korea or japan. i believe it has 20 frets. it has a semi-laminated faded sunburst top and there are no controls. i have no idea what wood its made out of. im guessing spruce or plywood lol. the body style is a 3/4 dreadnaught, no cutaway with the painted music note "pickguard." its got a thick ass neck, probably the thickest one ive ever seen, copper frets which wear down easily and make your fingers smell like shit. the bridge/tailpiece is just a block of wood with fretwire or some other metal strip and the tailpiece is just a little piece of metal. i think someone else has this guitar. maybe 4th or 5th post.

well i cant really chord on this axe. if i do, its only for a little while cause that neck is too fat. the sound varies if theres old strings or new strings on there. the sound is kinda bright on the upper strings but very dull on the bass strings. i dunno, i love it. its got so much character.

lets be honest ok? the guitar was built from plywood. i dont know how they made it really. i have no idea how the action was 55 years ago but its pretty decent now. im sure it looked good in the 50's but its got some scratchs, nicks, dings, etc. the fretboard is starting to wear away at the first fret and the neck paint is completely gone from that same area.

id say the durability is pretty damn good. were talking the 50's here. this guitar is still around and still plays as well as some of the newest entry level acoustics that are on the market. i bought a martin dm a few years back and i never got completely comfortable with it. id like to think my little axe can stand up to the elements with the best of 'em. the thing never goes out of tune. i did have to change the tuners though. got a cheap set at a music store and went to town. no regrets. definately would play at a gig without backup.

im sure this company dissolved long before i started my 21 years on this earth. so no info on warrany/customer service.

ive been playing for about 8 years and i bought this guitar way before that. i think i was 10 and i thought it looked cool. one day i decided that i was gonna learn me some guitar and the rest is history. this guitar is irreplaceable. i mean look at this board. no one even knows anything about it. it could be rare. i just love its vintage appearance. the size is fantastic. no sore arms from those big dreadnaughts. i think the neck weighs more than the body itself. i wish i had a few more of these.

if anyone knows anything about these guitars please contact me at xchevelleSS396x@aol.com id love to get a history of my little baby.

I'm writing this in hopes that someone out there will have a clue what it is. The most distinctive features are two white birds on the pickguard, a weird bridge with two screws in it, and a gold sticker with the Kay logo on the headstock. Natural finish, black pickguard, actually a pretty decent guitar.

This is the area where I love and hate it. It sounds fantastic in its unique way, but only for about five seconds. Touch the strings, and it goes out of tune. I'm trying to find out if it has any vintage value at all. If not, those tuners are out of there. If it stayed in tune, I'd give it an eight.

Well, its survived this long.

If anyone out there knows what this is, let me know. If it stayed in tune, it would be a great guitar.

Wow, what can I say. This tank came up for sale at a military base over in England. It was COVERED in dust from someone's attic, basemant or car trunk. Who knows? It is a Kay Model K-475. Made in Korea and I haven't got a clue WHEN it was made. The sound hole is exactly that, a round hole (no f holes), the tuners are a bright silver/chrome, The pick guard is a dark brown/black (I don't remember), and there is a painted on 'K' logo. I'm not even sure of the wood used to make it. It is a blonde color on top with brownish red sides and back. Looks almost like cherry sides and back.
It's been really hammered as the frets show lotrs of wear. Not from filing but from playing. Finish is satin.

I tend to appreciate classical, country, folk and contemporary music. I prefer guitar but like all string instruments.

The sound on the Kay (despite a broken string) is rich and pure. Kinda flyies in the face of other reviews on this page.

As mentioned above, the frets show lots of wear. The tuners are like new though they were covered with dust originally. Set up seems ok, fit and finish are adequate for my needs. There ARE flaws in workmanship though they only add character to this instrument. It is VERY rough in manufacture. Can we say it looks almost 'handmade'? (as you can see, my NEEDS aren't very much for this guitar)

Not sure. That it has survived an apparent life of duress and hardship, It still hangs together. Yeah, It could take live playing (lullabies), the finish might last, hardware seems solid and/or newer, strap buttons are in SOLID and I would rely on it to get me through a few song writing sessions. Gig? The only gigging I do is frog gigging..............

The beast is built rough,......like a tank. Better be anyway after what I've heard about Kay guitars (the cheap ones).

Haven't got a clue but I'd bet it's nonexistent. Warranty? Probably until you handed over your money and left the store. Store?? You mean it wasn't sold by a street vendor in lower anywhere? Who knows.

I've been playing AT playing for over 40 years, own three guitars, a mountain dulcimer and a banjo. Play them all (after a fashion)

I made this entry since I really didn't have ANY luck with research I've done for the Kay guitars. Well, a LITTLE luck. I'd like to know more about this particular model (K-475). It's a bit eccentric, just like me and would fit in my life.

First time I saw it, strings not trimmed and turned back like an old folk player (probably the original strings too) I was reminded of the first time I watched Bob Dylan perform, live.

Any help on the K-475???

My Kay whom I have have named "Anna-belle" is from 1958 and has 20 frets .It has a maple top and mahogany sides and has a really fat neck profile.It is a 3/4 size dreadnought is the perfect size for any adult player

Man,does it sound beautiful.When you play it with full chords it sounds magnificent,the sound is very bright and airy

It has a few knicks in the finish but thats to be expected from a guitar made in 1958

This guitar would make a great live or recording guitar .If you play it in front of a microphone with effects it sounds amazing,the only problem with it is the bridge is slightly raised because someone had
.13 gauge strings on it for the longest time

If a guitar like this was stolen I would definitly buy another one .I wish there was a 12 string version of this guitar out there.

First, I would like to say that ANYONE DUMB ENOUGH TO PAY 20-50 BUCKS ON A GUITAR SHOULD BE SHOT IN THE HEAD FOR BEING SUCH A DUMBASS CHEAPSKATE!!! FUCKIN IDIOTS ALL OF YOU!!!! That being said let's move on :)

I bought this baby off of a buddy who needed some quick cash, i gave him 70 bucks canadian for it and it is truly the best investemnt i've ever made. when i got it, it was in rough shape, as all vintage guitars that cheap usually are, but it didn't take long for it to gorw on me. It has a real Gibson Songbird look to it by its two (no not just one) pickguards with its rustic stencilled country western design, but all in all adds character to the thing. After a quick dress up of new martin super light strings, a set up job and new bone bridge, it sounds quite pleasant, not the rich bold sound most look for in an acoustic, but more of a dark sound, works for me.

the tuners ended up pissing me off so i threw on the tuners from my montana acoustic that was out of commission (warped neck) and havent had a problem since, I LOVE THIS ACOUSTIC. out plays any acoustic i've ever played (except maybe a martin or a a high end cort) and the most bang for my buck i'll ever have

My style lately is weening towards a Jon MAyer kind of approach, nice bluesy backbone with lots of heart, nice geting away from my death metal shit.

Guitar again makes a dark well defined sound (you can hear every pick shot) as well as a different shimmering sound.

well, i think this thing changed hands about 5-20 times before i got it, and i intend to keep it that way. finish by the neck joint is beginning to come up and crack (damed humidity) but besides that the standard scratches and such

i've used this on many bar gigs and now i cant take the damn thing out of tune. bend the shit out of the notes all you want, this thing can take it, strap buttons i replaces with locks as alaways, i need to make a new nute for it, but not a priority now, i use this thing all the time, practice, gigs, it is my main acoustic and will be until i find better

as far as i know, kay isnt around anymore

I've been playing for about 9 years now, got my shit down. I've had an ibanez rg770, cort viva, fender american strats, mexi strats, gibsons, epiphones, squiers, cheap ass hondos, pretty much everything i can find, i play right now through a fender ultimate chorus with all individual pedals, pedalboards are shit. If this guyitar was stolen i'd have to think where the hell i'd start to find another, nothin will compare to this one.

small bodied acoustic with the famous/infamous white painted deco music note design. cheap wood, nice sunburst finish, big fat neck and brass frets. el cheapo mail order type thing. doesn't really have any features. Has a bolt-on "steel reinforced neck". Looks pretty cool, very vintage 40's/50's.

I love the sound of this thing, just like Robert Johnson or Skip James. For real. Blues machine with good sustain for a cheap little guitar. Doesn't sound that great for strummed chords but for authentic fingerpicked delta blues this is the real deal. I usually tune all the strings down a whole step and you can get a nice low end that way. This thing is totally playable all the way up the neck and has surprisingly good intonation. Single note lines sound really thick and cool on this baby. One of the best sounding guitars I've had for old-time folk and blues stuff. Pure vintage tone. Oh, you can raise the action and it sounds really good for slide also. Son House. Preachin' the blues.

Action on this is great, plays really well all the way up the neck. Single note stuff sounds really good, even up at the 12th-15th frets (that's usually about as high as I go...). Didn't have tuners when I got it so I pulled some off of another little cheap, old trash guitar and they work fine, stays in tune really well. fretwork is good, neck is straight.

This thing is probably from the 50's and is still in nice shape, very dependable. I'd gig with this anywhere, anytime, no backup.

I paid 3 bucks for this thing, it needed tuners and a bridge, both of which I cobbled from old junkers I had. I'm truly amazed at how great this little guitar sounds and plays. I've recorded with it and people think it's a dobro. It's the only acoustic I have right now and it would take some serious cash to get me to part with it. This is the kind of tone that money cannot buy. It just is. Martin and Gibson can go to the devil.

Actually, I do know. In the late 60s (twentieth century) to early 70s several American guitar manufacturers became guitar importers, sorta like cars later, except generally the only continuity was the name, which could be bought and sold. Kay was probably still making guitars in Chicago when most or all of the guitars in this bunch were made. Mine is a 1974 or so Japanese-made dreadnought, and a little research has id'ed the factory where it was made as Teisco del Rey, or however that's spelled. It'd be like a $300 guitar if made now--nicely finished sorta Martin copy with a solid top and laminated sides and back--except for one thing that pushes it up and a couple things that push it down. The up is Brazilian rosewood, though that only in laminates and the headstock overlay. The downs are badly done fretboard inlays (I think they've got better cheap methods now) and the sound-robbing "adjustable bridge" found on many '70s acoustics. The latter is gonna change. I do my own work on my guitars (more cheapskate than talented), and this one is in pretty good playing condition. It plays, and the sound is not so bad with decent strings, better when I get that floating metal out from under the saddle.

Just a really cheap acoustic guitar. Bad tuners. Bad bridge (mine is plastic with two screws in it. Bad tailpiece. What everybody else said.

What nobody else said, however was how much of a gem this little baby is. When I bought it for $30 (a bit much) at the flea market, I was looking for a beat-up guitar with character to write songs on. Strangely enough this actually works. This terrible, crackity old guitar can crank out the new songs. I have mine tuned way down because the neck might snap off at standard tuning. It actually has before. I have it tuned to where the second (fat string) is tuned to a standard guitar's low E. So I guess the low E string is a B. If I put a capo on the third fret, it becomes a standard tuned guitar. This makes the guitar have a really low, old sound. Kinda like Tom Waits or Beck's "One Foot in the Grave" album, which is the sound I was looking for. You have to be very gentle with this guitar. You can't bang on it. Fingerpicking delta blues style works really well. Not a very professional sound. . . definitely not a Martin or Taylor; and it's not a guitar that you can play with other tuned instruments, but loads of character and songwriting mojo.

Like I said earlier, the neck did snap off once and stayed on the wall in my dorm room for about a month. I simply glued it back on and clamped it overnight and haven't had a problem since. The tuners look really bad, but they keep the guitar in tune very well. My guitar had a pretty sweet sunburst paintjob on it with the tell-tale white note, but I sanded/scraped most of that off to make it look even older.

I guess it's made it this far. It'll probably last a million years. I wouldn't play without a backup. I can't decide if it's gigworthy or not. Maybe for a few songs but that's about it.

The greatest un-great guitar ever. I don't know how many songs that it has helped me write, but it's a lot. I don't like to let other people andle it because I'm afraid of what might happen to my baby.
If it were stolen (yeah right) or lost, or more likely broken, I don't think that I would buy another one because I don't think that there is another one out there like it. I would search for another old character guitar for songwriting purposes, though. There's just something about it.

I believe that my unknown Kay was made sometime in late '63 or early '64 because I was in eigth grade at the time and the Beatle's had already done the USA the previous February. I kow that it was made in the USA because I still have the merchandising tag with the gold string somewhere in my collection.

It has 18 brass frets, the neck meets the body at the 14th fret. I would consider the frets to be fat in cross-section. I think that the fretboard is maple with rectangular black fret markers stenciled in at the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 12th, and 15th frets. The bridge is just a small block of maple with another brass fretlike insert. In order to maintain tune over the years mine has migrated from the original index marks to somewhere about "3/8 below that. The tailpiece is chrome plated steel with an art-deco style embossing that has endured the years gracefully. The tuners are no-name and are still servicable but somewhat frustrating at times.

The body has a plywood top, maple veneer, I think. It also has a way cool sunburst/tiger strip finish all over with painted white trim and that famous musical note that flanks the sound hole. The whole guitar smells like maple even after 38 years (oops, just revealed my age!)especially if you sniff the sound hole. Don't be embarassed, we've all done it! Especially in the beginning when all we knew was the single-note chord change to Louie Louie. You can only do that so many times before boredom sets in and the inevitable happens. But then you discover that with an extra note and a slight rhythm change you can also play a single-note back-up to Hang on Sloopy. Then you're back on the straight and narrow! I guess I am digressing more than just a bit, sorry. As far as accessories, mine came with a 45 RPM record and an 8 page book that was supposed to teach you how to play guitar in just hours by looking at lots of dots. The real time frame is probably more like a bazillion hours later! My rating for this category is a mix of my adolescent nievate (phonetic spelling. Hope I didn't butcher it too bad)and my more "mature" recollections of aquiring it.

I've used it to play all styles of music including finger-style and jazz. It certainly doesn't compete with my Gibson L-4 in the sound category but it's not repulsive either. Maybe I have very forgiving ears. The sound does tend to go muddy and dead if you play it too hard, even with new strings. But the sound will come back if you return to treating it gently. Once again a rating that is tempered by the adolescent inside.

For a low end guitar it was set up quite well and very playable even to this day although I have made a minor mod to the action decades later by removing the neck and using a couple business cards from my favorite music store to shim it up. Bookmatched top? who knows! It's masked by that way-cool finish I mentioned before! The only real flaw that persists to this day is the fact that the slot in the nut for the high E string still pinches the string slightly regardless of the guage which makes tuning just a bit tricky.

The fact that this guitar has endured everything that that I have subject it to all these years and is still playable and looks as good as it does is testimony to its reliability and durability and also to Kay Guitars for engineering a guitar that fits it's target user group very well. To this day I still break it out instead of my Gibson when I am in a nostalgic mood. Especially if I am going to play Louie Louie or Hang on Sloopy at a garage band gig!

It's kind of hard to get customer support from the type of place I bou got it from. Triple S Blue Stamps didn't offer customer support for any of the products they "sold" except maybe for the Cessna airplane that they once offered for a cost of 5000 books (that's right, books not bucks). A full book was worth about $3 back then.

I have been playing for about 38 years and have aquired lots of other guitars, amps, and harmonicas also.

For what it was engineered to be and the group of players it was targeted for, I think it is a very good value. If it were lost or stolen I would be very upset. It's irriplaceable. The very things I love about it, I also hate about it. It's so proletariate. It was a guitar for the masses. I notice that your other contributors were not very kind to this guitar. Maybe I'm just very tolerant. If somebody handed me a baseball bat attached to a tree slab and put strings on it, I would probably be up to the challenge and try to learn how to play it.