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History of Fender Guitars Reviews of Fender Guitars Fender Guitars on iMuso Related products Web Resources for Fender Guitars
Fender Electric Guitars
History of Fender Guitars
Fender guitars pre-date Rock 'n' Roll, so you could say that Clarence Leonidas "Leo" Fender was the midwife for all popular music in the western world. Leo Fender actually started making Hawaiian Steel guitars, sometimes called Lap Steel guitars, of the type that are played with a metal slide, this following some success in the field of record-player design. Lap Steels went electric in the thirties, largely led by another famous American guitar-maker, Rickenbacker, who pioneered the use electro-magnetic pickups. Leo Fender and his associate Doc Kauffman began experimenting with pickups on solid bodied Spanish guitars as early as 1943. After a brief spell of working together as K&F, Leo created Fender Manufacturing in 1946, changing the name to the Fender Electric Instrument Company in 1947.
The Fender facility at Fullerton started the serious business of developing new products to sell into an optimistic post-war America and Leo again considered the solid-bodied Spanish guitar with a pickup. Hollow f-hole guitars had already been produced with built-in pickups by Gibson, Epiphone and Rickenbacker, but they had failed to set the world on fire. Leo believed that a solid body would reduce the feedback problems inherent with amplified acoustic and semi-hollow guitars, as well as delivering a more accurate, better sustaining representation of the actual sound of the strings.
So in mid-1949 the first steps were taken towards the guitar design that would become known as the Fender Telecaster, but it would go through two name changes before receiving that iconic label. The first production run in 1950 had a single pickup and was called the Esquire. After flirting with a three-a-side headstock, Fender settled on the six-on-one-side snub-nosed Telecaster headstock design that we know and love today. But Fender's development was a wee bit ahead of its time and caused some amusement at a Chicago-based Musical Instrument trade fair in 1950.
A few more single- and double-pickup Esquire production runs were undertaken during that year and in late 1950 a truss-rod was added to the double-pickup model and its name was changed to the Broadcaster. The Fender Broadcaster very quickly attracted the attention of drum manufacturers Gretsch who had already registered a close variant of the Broadcaster name. Fender backed down immediately to preserve important industry relationships and the factory was instructed to snip the word "Broadcaster" off the headstock decal.
Another growing cultural phenomenon of the contemporary modern age was Television and it wasn't long before the guitar was re-designated as a "Telecaster". However Leo Fender's thrifty nature meant that the stock of clipped Broadcaster decals was to be used up before the new Telecaster decals were opened. The final Broadcaster decal met the scissors in August 1951. Estimates of the number of these "Nocasters" that were released into the market vary from between 50 and 500. But by looking at the size of the American market and the material restrictions imposed by the Korean War it can be guess-timated that around 200 Nocasters saw the light of the day. Whatever the number in reality, that full production run gave birth to a small but vibrant piece of guitar history.So Leo Fender gifted the Telecaster to the world and the world soon caught up with Leo's genius and sales of the Telecaster took off. With the Telecaster came a whole new ethic in guitar production. Where before luthiers had worked by hand to produce arch-topped hollow bodied guitars, Fender had devised a factory-made instrument that was put together from components. This principle and Fender's knack for innovation started another, equally important, revolution in 1951 with the introduction of the fretted Precision Electric Bass.
By 1954, with the management and sales side of Fender under control, the time was ripe for a new product. Leo Fender listened to the musicians that were already using the Telecaster and had made suggestions for improvements. By late 1954 the Fender Stratocaster was in production. Another stroke of Fender genius, the Stratocaster had several revolutionary features. It was contoured to make the body more comfortable to hold and play than the basic sharp-edged Telecaster, it had three pickups and incorporated a self-contained Vibrato unit (which Fender incorrectly called a Tremelo). The Stratocaster, affectionately nicknamed the Strat, is the most popular and easily recognisable musical instrument in the history of mankind with the possible exception of the Recorder. The Stratocaster, the Telecaster and the Precision Bass are still produced in vast quantities today. What other factory product from the early 1950's can make such a claim?
Reviews of Fender Guitars
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Stratocaster - The flagship of the Fender range.
Telecaster - The little piece of Fender genius that started it all.
Precision Bass - The original Electric Bass, another Fender innovation.
Jazz Bass - Cool looks and a big bright Fender bass voice.
Jaguar - The iconic extreme of Fender guitar design.
Related Product Reviews
Web Resources for Fender Guitars
Fender.com - The main home of all things Fender on the web.
Fender.co.uk - Fender's UK website.
Fender Musical Instruments - What does Wikipedia have to say about Fender?
Fender Footwear - Got a Fender guitar? Then get some Fender shoes!
Fender at Harmony Central - Read real player's opinions about Fender guitars.
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