Jung-gyu Park started out importing pianos into South Korea in 1960 under the name Soo Doh Piano, and the business only became a guitar maker in 1973, releasing its first Cort-branded instruments nine years later. Cort, now part of Cor-Tek Corporation and based in Seoul, has grown into one of the largest guitar manufacturers in the world, with factories across South Korea, Indonesia and China — much of that output builds instruments for other brands rather than carrying the Cort name itself. Its own-brand guitars span budget acoustics through to genuinely high-spec multi-scale metal guitars at prices well below equivalent Japanese or American-made instruments. We cover new Cort releases as they land, especially at the affordable end. Here's what we've written.
Cort CR300MT: A slim mahogany single-cut with EMG 81/60 pickups, 24 frets, and modern metal features. Priced at $899.99.
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Yes, and that is the most useful thing to know about it. Cor-Tek Corporation is one of the largest guitar makers in the world and produces instruments for many other companies as well as under its own name. A guitar with a different logo on the headstock may well have come off the same line.
The company was founded in 1973 as the Yoo-Ah company by Jung-gyu Park and is based in Seoul, South Korea. Young-ho Park is its chief executive. It has been supplying the global instrument market for most of the period in which mass-market guitars became genuinely playable.
They are one of the standard recommendations at the lower price points, largely because the company's contract manufacturing gives it factory capability well above what its own prices suggest. The higher series compete well past beginner territory too, which is less widely appreciated.
Cort is South Korean and has manufactured in South Korea, Indonesia and China across its history. The production country varies by series and model rather than by brand, so check the specific instrument.
