History of Fender Guitars
No other company has contributed more to the look and sound of the solidbody electric guitar than Fender. Leo Fender's original firm changed the course of popular music by revolutionizing the design and manufacture of electric guitars.
The Fender Telecaster
Leo started work in the summer of 1949 on the instrument which we now know as the Fender Telecaster. The Fender Telecaster is effectively the world's first commercially marketed solidbody electric guitar, and still very much alive today. The guitar, originally named the Fender Esquire and then the Fender Broadcaster, first went into production in 1950. Due to legal issues with the name, the guitar eventually became known as the Fender Telecaster.
Very few pre-production one-pickup Fender Esquire models without truss-rods were made in April 1950, with another tiny production run of two-pickup Esquires two months later. General production of the better-known single-pickup Esquire with truss-rod did not begin until January 1951.
In November 1950, a truss-rod was added to the two-pickup model, its name was changed to Broadcaster, and the retail price was fixed at $170. The Broadcaster guitar name was short lived halted in early 1951 after Gretsch, a large New York-based instrument manufacturer, indicated its prior use of "Broadkaster" on various drum products. At first, Fender simply used up its "Fender Broadcaster" decals on the guitar's headstock by cutting off the "Broadcaster" and leaving just the "Fender" logo; these no-name guitars are known among collectors today as a Fender Nocaster.
The new name decided upon for the Fender solid body electric guitar was Telecaster, coined by Don Randall and Leo Fender. The idea for the name came from the recently innovative new invention of the Television. The Telecaster name was on headstocks by April 1951, and at last Fender's new $189.50 solid body electric had a permanent name.
By 1953 Fender was manufacturing the Telecaster and Esquire, as well as a line of seven amplifiers: Bandmaster, Bassman, Champ, Deluxe, Princeton, Super and Twin.
The Fender Stratocaster
By the early 1950s Leo Fender, Freddie Tavares, and Bill Carson began to formulate the guitar that would become the Stratocaster or Strat. Bill Carson was one of Leo’s friends and was a successful touring musician. In the early days Leo would give specific players a guitar to “field test”. He would then solicit their input on what changes or improvements could be made to an existing instrument or simply what new instrument he should work to develop. Bill played the Fender Broadcaster and then moved on to the Telecaster. There were things about the Telecaster that Bill just didn’t like. He felt that the guitar needed a “belly cut” and used a hacksaw to create his own arm contour in an effort to make the guitar more comfortable. In working with Freddie Tavares and Leo in the development of the Stratocaster he felt strongly about using individual saddles for each string to help the instrument intonate and stay in tune properly. Since Freddie was from Hawaii and was a full time session player, he emphasized his frustration in losing gigs to steel guitar players who got the gigs because of their unique style of tremolo and vibrato that they accomplished with their slides. With these requests in mind the ideas for this new guitar were put into motion. A new body shape, with a 6 saddle bridge, three pickups, and a vibrato was about to be born. Since space travel was in its infancy, the new name for a new guitar was going to be easy. The Fender Stratocaster was eventually launched during 1954 — samples around May and June were followed by the first proper production run in October. It was priced at $249.50 (or $229.50 without vibrato). The new Fender Stratocaster was the first soldbody electric with three pickups, and also featured a new-design built-in vibrato unit (or "tremolo" as Fender called it) to provide pitch-bending and shimmering chordal effects for the player.
The Strat came with a radically sleek, solid body, based on the shape of earlier Fender Precision Bass, contoured for the player's comfort and finished in a yellow to black sunburst finish. Even the jack socket mounting was new, recessed in a stylish plate on the body face. The Stratocaster looked like no other guitar around — and in some ways seemed to owe more to contemporary automobile design than traditional guitar forms, especially in the flowing, sensual curves of the beautifully proportioned and timeless body.
On its 40th anniversary in 1994 an official Fender estimate put Stratocaster sales so far at between a million and a million-and-a-half guitars — and that's without the plethora of unsubtle copies or more subtly "influenced" guitars that subsequently appeared from hundreds of other guitar-makers. The Fender Stratocaster has appeared in the hands of virtually every great guitarist over the years. Back in the 1950s it was a more specialized market, but nonetheless the Strat fired the music then of players such as Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and Buddy Guy.
Fender Guitars - More than a Strat or Tele
As the 1960s got underway it was clear that Fender had become a remarkably successful company. In a relatively short period Fender's brilliantly inventive trio of Telecaster, Precision Bass and Stratocaster had established in the minds of musicians and guitar-makers the idea of the solid body electric guitar as a viable modern instrument.
In January 1965, the Fender companies were sold to the mighty Columbia Broadcasting System Inc, better known as CBS, for 13 million dollars. The sale of Fender to CBS has provoked much retrospective consternation among guitarists and collectors, some of whom considered so-called "pre-CBS" instruments in other words those made prior to the beginning of 1965 — as superior to those made after that date.
In 1968, The Thinline Telecaster, which had three hollowed-out cavities inside the body and a modified pickguard shaped to accommodate the single, token f-hole was introduced. It was also around this time — and quite apart from Fender — that Byrds guitarist Clarence White and drummer Gene Parsons came up with their "shoulder strap control" B-string-pull device (later known as a B-Bender) that fit onto a Telecaster. It was designed to offer string-bends within chords to emulate pedal steel-type sounds.
As the close of the 1960s loomed, Fender took a boost when an inspired guitarist by the name of Jimi Hendrix applied the sensuous curves and glorious tone of the Stratocaster to his live cavorting and studio experiments. Salesman Dale Hyatt once said that Hendrix caused more Stratocaster sales than all the Fender salesmen put together.
In 1972, Fender gave the Tele a humbucking pickup at the neck position to create the Telecaster Custom, and similar dabbling led to a sort of Tele-meets-Strat-meets-Gibson: the two humbucker, Strat-neck Tele Deluxe of 1973.
In 1982 the Vintage reissue series was introduced. These Fender guitars consisted of a maple-neck "57" and rosewood-fingerboard "62" Strat, as well as a "52" Tele. These Vintage reproductions were not exact enough for some die-hard Fender collectors, but generally the guitars were praised and welcomed.
In 1985 CBS sold Fender to an investor group led by Bill Schultz, then president of Fender Musical Instruments. Fender established a new factory in Corona, California and introduced the American Standard Stratocaster in 1986 and the American Standard Telecaster in 1988.
The American Standard Strat was an efficacious piece of re-interpretation. It drew from the best of the original Stratocaster but was updated with a flatter-camber 22-fret neck and a revised vibrato unit based on twin stud pivot points. Once the Corona plant's production lines reached full speed, the American Standard Stratocaster proved extremely successful for the revitalized Fender operation. By the early 1990s, the instrument was a best-seller, and was notching up some 25,000 sales annually.
In 1987 the Fender Custom Shop was officially established at the Corona plant. Fender Custom Shop was started so that Fender could build one-offs and special orders for players who had the money and the inclination. While this role remains — customers have ranged from Chet Atkins to Lou Reed — Fender Custom Shop now has a much wider part to play in Fender's expanding business. One of the most recent popular type of guitar is the Fener Custom Shop Relic.
Larry Brooks in the Custom Shop built a hybrid guitar for grunge king Kurt Cobain in 1993 after the guitarist came up with some ideas for a merged Jaguar and Mustang: the Jag-Stang. A number of Fender models beyond Stratocasters and Telecasters were proving popular at this time with grunge guitarists: Cobain himself played Jaguars and Mustangs; Steve Turner played a Mustang; J Mascis had a Jazzmaster. And the reason was straightforward. These guitars had the comforting Fender logo on the head, but could be bought more cheaply secondhand than a Strat or Tele. The ethics of such deals suited grunge guitarists perfectly.
The latest offering from Fender Custom Shop is the Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilt Guitars. These incredible instruments are handmade by the Master Builder's themselves. They are made to the exact specifications of the customer, be it Clapton, Vaughan, or Billy down the street. The Fender Masterbuilt Guitars are the highest quality instruments that Fender makes.
As the 21st century gets underway, Fender is as aware as ever of the value of Leo's surname. But many musicians, collectors and guitar dealers measure the worth of Fender purely in terms of past achievements — which must be a continuing frustration for a modern company whose new ideas are often resisted for being "un-Fender."
Fender has reached the enviable point today where it dominates the world's electric guitar market. It has achieved its current successes in a variety of ways, not least by trying to provide a model or models that will appeal to every conceivable type of guitar Player at every level of skill and affluence.
