About Us
The birth of Diamond Bottlenecks hails back to nearly forty years ago now. A passion for creating the ‘perfect’ glass bottleneck for slide guitar started with a fledging slide guitarist staring at an old photograph of an early Delta bluesman featured on the back of a crumpled old blues album in the sales bin at a local record store.
Growing more and more disillusioned every day with his collection of metal, pyrex and ceramic tubes he’d obtained over time from local music stores, the young guitarist couldn’t avert his eyes from the picture of the old Mississippi bluesman, his well-worn resonator guitar……and the broken glass bottleneck he wore on his finger!
After weeks of scouring dozen’s of music stores and hearing the same weary reply “….sorry mate – nobody makes those!.....” The young slide-guitarist just happened to wander into a craft supply store, and behold - a glass bottle-cutting kit for sale, designed to chop wine bottles in half to create vases - this was the moment of Diamond Bottlenecks' conception!!
Honing his bottleneck slide-making skills over time, and supplying these genuine glass bottleneck guitar slides to local music stores, commendations began to filter through to much larger, specialist guitar accessory suppliers nationwide – and brought about problems of keeping a steady, continuous supply of top quality glass bottleneck slides to ably satisfy demands from a growing customer base.
Enter the second phase of the Diamond Bottlenecks story! The year is 1992, and by this time the more 'mature' slide guitarist/bottleneck-maker is now living close to the centre of the U.K. glass-making industry. This gave him the chance to meet up with the right people who could provide consistent, premium quality production, and the chance to create an awesome, diverse range of glass guitar bottlenecks and slides to satisfy every possible needs of music stores, professional musicians and general slide guitarists alike......
And the success story continues to this very day. Privileged to be based in a specially equipped glass design & restoration workshop/studio located in one of the U.K.'s last traditional 150-year old glass-making factories, shared with the cream of our U.K. glassblowers, engravers & master glass craftsmen all dedicated and passionate to the many aspects of this specialist art - we are constantly presented with genuine glass guitar bottlenecks and crystal glass slides of breathtaking beauty – shown here on our website in all their glorious detail…..
We at Diamond Bottlenecks thank everyone across the globe who's passion is to slide cylindrical objects across guitar strings; our endorsers; stockists; distributors and especially our customers whose support, ideas, inspiration and kindness has been truly immeasurable ~ it has, and to this day still continues to be, ‘fun all the way!’
With best wishes to all from Ian McWee, Richard Lamming, Tejinder Singh (Tom) Bhandal & Ian Bamforth in the U.K.; Brett & Donna Taylor at our mainland Europe workshop / outlet in Brux, Central France ~ and to all of our dedicated support team; 2015.