Bill Collings was building guitars in Houston in the mid-1970s and moved to Austin in the early 1980s. In 1987 the vintage dealer George Gruhn ordered twenty-five of them, which is roughly the point the operation stopped being one man in a room. Collings died in 2017. The shop is still in Austin and still builds the same way.
The acoustics came first and they are what most people know. Dreadnoughts, OMs, and the small-bodied 001 and 0002H, with old-growth Sitka tops, Adirondack bracing and 42-style snowflake inlay when someone asks for it.
Collings showed its first electrics at Summer NAMM in 2006 with the I-35, the City Limits and the 290. The line now runs solid, semi-hollow and hollow: the slab-bodied 290 with P-90s or humbuckers, the 620 and the 71, the City Limits, the semi-hollow I-35 and SoCo, the fully hollow I-30, and the Statesman and Eastside archtops.
The 470 JL is the second thing Collings and Julian Lage have made together, after the OM1 JL acoustic. Fully hollow with a trestle block, Honduran mahogany with a maple laminate top, Ron Ellis Ellisonics pickups, 24 7/8 inch scale, Bigsby B3, pinned ebony bridge. On the I-35 LC the pickup people ask for by name is the ThroBak SLE-101.
We are the biggest Collings electric dealer in Canada, and the acoustics come through here too. We spec both sides one build at a time: the top wood, the bracing, the inlay, the pickups, the finish. Every Collings guitar that ships from Ottawa crosses Ian Vance's bench first. If the one you want is not on this page, we will order it.