B.C. Rich

B.C. Rich founded by the late Bernardo Chavez Rico in 1969 and the early 1970s ( B.C. Rich is a manufacturer of guitars and bass guitars) Throughout the 1960s, Bernardo Chavez Rico built flamenco guitars in Bernardo's Guitar Shop in Los Angeles, California. B.C. Rich considers its birth to be in 1969, when Rico first attempted to build electric guitars. He built ten basses inspired by the Gibson EB-3 and ten guitars inspired by the Gibson Les Paul. Rico's first original guitar design came in 1972, with the Seagull. 1976 saw the original Mockingbird and Eagle designs, and the Bich came in 1978.
As the popularity of Rico's guitars grew, he decided to begin manufacturing a line of less expensive guitars in Japan. This line was originally called B.C. Rico. This name was given to make a distinction between the US-made and imported guitars, but was dropped due to a lawsuit filed by the Rico Reed Company. Only about a hundred of these are believed to have made it into the US. These Japanese (and later Korean) made guitars were subsequently known as the NJ series, which originally stood for Nagoya, Japan, the place where they were manufactured. NJ still serves to distinguish an imported line of B.C. Rich guitars and basses, along with the more affordable Platinum and Bronze series.

There was also a very inexpensive Rave series in the 1980s, as well as a higher-quality L.A. Series. The B.C. Rico and early NJ guitars and basses were of neck-through body construction, and were very well made instruments. The present imported guitars are mostly basic bolt-on neck construction (except for the current NJ Classic and N.T. series). B.C. Rich also created an innovation known as I.T. (Invisibolt Technology) which bolts the neck extremely deep into the body rather than the typical neck joint.

By the mid-1990s, B.C. Rich's guitars were widely used in heavy metal, partly because the instruments' unusual designs were deemed more appropriate for the threatening image many metal performers wanted to project. The popularity of B.C. Rich instruments among metal musicians continues to the present.