Yamaha is one of the oldest companies in the music business, founded in 1887, but it’s electric guitars of the late 1960s – exemplified by the SA-15 – looked like anything but the product of a long-established musical instrument company.

The SA-15 appeared to come from two different design teams, as if the first team got half of the way to creating a Rickenbacker and then the second team took over.

The upper part of the body was actually a smoothed-down version of the infamous Yamaha solidbody SG-5A, better known as the Flying Samurai, which did in fact look like a reversed Rickenbacker; the lower body half was traditionally symmetrical.

Also like the Rickenbacker, the Yamaha had a semi-hollow body with a soundhole, but again, the design inspiration appeared to be split between a Rickenbacker slash-hole on the upper half and a traditional (though reversed) f-hole on the lower half.

Despite it’s shaky start in the 1960s, Yamaha would go on to contribute popular and enduring designs to the electric guitar world in the last quarter of the 20th century.