Bill Lawrence is a pioneering engineer of guitar pickups.  He is one of key persons who made present style of guitar pickups.

Here, Bill Lawrence are Moridaira Gakki brand name of guitar which Bill Lawrence pickups are installed. There are no further relationship more than that.

This company is famous for Morris acoustic guitar brand and H.S.Anderson brand produced by Hidesato Shiino.  A unique telecaster called  “Mad Cat” played by the late “Prince” was manufactured there as Hohner brand.

At first, they started selling electric guitars as Bill Lawrence brand, and then did low cost edition as Bill’s Brothers brand.  But they were forced to stop manufacturing because of copyright problem between original Bill Lawrence and them.  To the extent that I know, they continued manufacturing Bill Lawrence guitars until 1996.  After that Bill’s Brothers guitars were continued to make for a while.

In case of Bill Lawrence guitars, the 3rd character of the most model number is written by Roman numerals originally, but in this site I use Arabic numerals for the sake of convenience.

<HISTORY>
    •    1965  Established by Toshio Moridaira in April. Became Inc. in July. Released acoustic guitars as Morris brand.
    •    1968  Started import and export business.
    •    1973  Released H.S.Anderson guitars.
    •    the mid 80s  Released Bill Lawrence guitars.
    •    1989  Toshio Moridaira became board chairman and Youichi Minagawa was up to CEO.
    •    1997  A united corporate identity (CI) was determined between Moridaira Gakki Inc. and Morris Gakki Seizou Inc..  They adapted brand logos commonly use “M” character on a eagle head.
    •    2000  Youichi Minagawa became president of Morris Gakki Seizou Inc., and Tamio Minagawa was up to CEO.
(by Wikipedia)