Ernie Ball Inc.

Ernie Ball is an American instrument and guitar accessory company based in San Luis Obispo, California. The brand was started by Ernie Ball in 1962 as a custom line of guitar strings. The company manufactures and sells guitars through Ernie Ball Music Man.

Roland Sherwood "Ernie" Ball was a professional musician in Los Angeles and played guitar in the United States Air Force Band during the Korean War. In the 1950s, he began working as a studio musician and teacher.

Sometime in 1957 or 1958, Ball opened a music store in Tarzana, California. He claimed it was the first shop in the United States to sell guitars exclusively. When music sales representatives criticized him for refusing to sell drumsticks and other musical equipment, Ball replied, "I just want to sell guitars." Within the next two years he opened additional stores in Canoga Park and Thousand Oaks. Ball and his company appeared in a 1965 television commercial for the Xerox 813 photocopier.

With the guitar-based rock revival of the 1960s, Ball noticed that beginner students were having difficulty playing the bestselling Fender #10 medium gauge strings, particularly in holding down or bending the stiff .028" third ("G") string. At the time, it was common for a set of strings to have a third string that was "wound". He approached the Fender company with the problem, suggesting a lighter gauge, but was rebuffed. Ball convinced a string manufacturer to make him custom sets with a 24-gauge third string which he sold in his store. He would also order separate strings in various sizes and displayed them in a makeshift case allowing musicians to experiment in creating their own sets. Located not far from Hollywood, the store began to attract a large patronage of professional musicians, including The Beach Boys, Merle Travis, and The Ventures.^{[citation needed]}

Ball also began to notice the practice of "slack stringing" among players who discarded the bottom sixth string and added a banjo first string on top. This resulted in an overall lighter gauge set with a plain third string. Again, he contacted Fender with a suggestion for a lighter set and was turned down. He then approached Gibson, who also turned him down. So, once again he ordered from the manufacturer naming the product the Ernie Ball Slinky. Slinky strings traveled the country with the profession musicians who used them and before long, Ball was receiving mail orders from individuals and stores.

The characteristic packaging of Ball's guitar strings was designed by Rolly Crump, a Disney Imagineer. Slinky strings went on to become popular with mainstream artists in the rock n' roll genre.

In 1967, Ball decided to focus solely on strings and guitar accessories, and moved the business to Newport Beach. In 1972, the company manufactured its first guitar; the Earthwood acoustic-electric bass. Ernie Ball began producing a model in the early 1970s. His aim was to provide bass guitarists with a more acoustic-sounding instrument that would match better with the sound of acoustic guitars. Ball stated that "...if there were electric bass guitars to go with electric guitars then you ought to have acoustic basses to go with acoustic guitars." Ball said that "...the closest thing to an acoustic bass was the Mexican guitarron...in mariachi bands, so I bought one down in Tijuana and tinkered with it."

Ball collaborated with George William Fullerton, a former employee at Fender, to develop the Earthwood. Production of this instrument ceased in 1974, resuming a few years later under the direction of Ernie Ball's employee Dan Norton, until production finally ended again in 1985. The Earthwood acoustic bass guitar was quite large and deep in contrast to most instruments in current production, which gave it more volume, especially in the low register. The Ernie Ball company describes Ball's design as "an idea before its time"; the instrument was little used in acoustic musical performances until the late 1980s, when the acoustic basses were used in performances on the MTV Unplugged television program.