What is a Dobro? 

Dobro is a trade name that is now owned by the Gibson Guitar Corporation and used for a particular design of resonator guitar. The name dobro is generically associated with the single-inverted-cone resonator design. The dobra guitar is often called "The Blues Guitar of the South".

As well as recreating the traditional sounds and look, resonator guitars have also become the foundation for even further developments in the world of guitars. Many "Dobro" style guitars are now hybrid electric guitars and some manufactures such as Ellis Guitars are adding strings to create 7 and 8 string resonator style guitars.  

The Dobro brand also appeared, legitimately, on other instruments, notably the electric lap steel guitars and solid body electric guitars and other resonator instruments, such as Safari mandolins.

When Gibson acquired the name in 1993, they announced that they would defend their right to its exclusive use.

The name Dobro originated in 1928 when the Dopyera brothers formed the Dobro Manufacturing Company. They later sold it to Mr Alexander Allen, a wealthy banker, to manufacture a new resonator guitar design they called the Dobro. "Dobro" is both a contraction of "Dopyera brothers" and a word meaning "good" in their native Slovak language. An early company motto was "Dobro means good in any language".

The Dobro was the third resonator guitar design by John Dopyera, the inventor of the resonator guitar, but the second to enter production. Unlike his earlier tricone design, the Dobro had a single resonator cone and it was inverted, with its concave surface facing up. The Dobro company described this as a bowl shaped resonator.

The Dobro was louder than the tricone, and cheaper to produce. Cost of manufacture had, in Dopyera's opinion, priced the resonator guitar beyond the reach of many players, and his failure to convince his fellow directors at the National String Instrument Corp. to produce a single cone version was part of his motivation for leaving.

Since National Corp. had applied for a patent on the single cone, Dopyera had to develop an alternative design, which he did by inverting the cone so that rather than having the strings rest on the apex of the cone as per the National method, they rested on a cast aluminum "spider" which had 8 legs sitting on the perimeter of the upside down cone.

In the following years both Dobro and National built a wide variety of metal- and wood-bodied single-cone guitars, while National also continued with the tricone for a time.

By 1934 the Dopyera brothers had gained control of both National and Dobro and they merged the companies to form the National Dobro Corporation.  From the outset, wooden bodies had been sourced from existing guitar manufacturers, particularly the plywood student guitar bodies.

Emile Dopyera (also known as Ed Dopera) manufactured Dobros from 1959, before selling the company and name to Semie Moseley, who merged it with his Mosrite guitar company and manufactured Dobros for a time. Meantime, in 1967, Rudy and Emile Dopyera formed the Original Musical Instrument Co. (OMI) to manufacture resonator guitars, which were at first branded "Hound Dog". However in 1970 they again acquired the Dobro name, Mosrite having gone into temporary liquidation.

In 1993, OMI, together with the Dobro name, was acquired by the Gibson Guitar Corp. They renamed the company Original Acoustic Instruments and moved production to Nashville. Gibson now uses the name "Dobro" only for models with the inverted-cone design used originally by the Dobro Manufacturing Company.

Shirlan