The story of Diamond Bottlenecks hails back to over thirty years ago. The passion for creating the ‘perfect’ glass bottleneck for slide guitar started with a young slide guitarist staring at an old photograph of an early bluesman featured on the back of a crumpled old blues album for sale 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 guitarist happened to wander into a craft supply store and, behold…. a glass bottle-cutting kit made to chop wine bottles in half to create vases.... Diamond Bottlenecks was born!!

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 dealers 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 now-older guitarist/bottleneck-maker is living close by 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.

The success story continues to this very day. Privileged to be based in large, fully equipped premises, shared with the cream of U.K. glass-blowers, engravers and glass craftsmen dedicated and passionate to all aspects of this specialist art, we are constantly presented with glass guitar bottlenecks and slides of breathtaking beauty – shown here on our website in all their glorious detail…..

Purple Swampy

We at Diamond Bottlenecks wish to thank everyone across the globe; our fellow musicians, music dealers, distributors and especially our customers whose support, ideas, inspiration, help and kindness has been truly immeasurable….it has, and still continues to be, ‘fun all the way!’

With best wishes to all from;- Ian McWee, Brett Taylor, Richard Lamming & our dedicated support team; Spring 2004.