The six pushbuttons on Guild’s Stratford X-350 of 1953 looked remarkably like the pickup selector system on Epiphone’s Zephyr Emperor Regent model, and the similarity was no coincidence.

Guild was formed with key employees from Epiphone who had stayed in NY when Epi production was moved to Philadelphia. Guild made a huge splash with it’s debut line in 1953, which included seven large-bodied (17 inches wide) electric archtops – five with cutaways and two non-cutaways.

Despite the X-350’s upscale appointments – including block inlays, gold-plated hardware, three pickups, and the pushbutton system – it was only a midline model. It went through a number of changes, among them a laminated maple top (the original was laminated spruce), a shorter scale length (from 25.5 to 24.75 inches), and humbucking pickups, but like Gibson’s three-pickup ES-5, it succumbed in the 1960s, as the Folk Boom switched Guild’s focus to acoustics and electric players began to realize that, for most performance situations, two pickups were enough.