F E N DER The definitive guide
to the guitars that made FENDER great
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fender’s golden era NocasterS Broadcasters & EsquireS Telecasters Vintage Strats Precision & Jazz Basses Jazzmasters Mustangs & JagUARS Inside the Custom Shop
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CONTENTS
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GUITARIST PRESENTS…
LEGENDS of TONE | FENDER EARLY HISTORY
The golden era
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80 82 86 88 90 92 94 95 96
Electric Innovator
The telecaster 14 16 20 21 22 24 25 26
Introduction A Plank For All Seasons 1950 Broadcaster 1951 Nocaster Wilko Johnson’s ’62 Telecaster Rory Gallagher’s Esquire Rory Gallagher’s Telecaster 10 Great Telecaster Tones
The CBS era 98 100 104 106 108 110
The Stratocaster 30 32 36 38 40 42 46 52 56 60
Introduction Fender’s Finest Synchronizity The Inbetweeners Milestone Stratocasters Travelling Back To 1954 Origin Of The Species David Gilmour’s Black Strat Jimi Hendrix’s Black Strat 10 Great Stratocaster Tones
Introduction Company, Bought & Sold The CBS Stratocaster CBS Telecaster Models The F-hole Story 10 Great CBS Era Tones
FENDER IN THE MODERN ERA 112 114 120 126 134
The Jazzmaster & Jaguar 66 64 68 70 71 72 76 78
Introduction Sittin’ On Top Of The World The Colour Of Sound Fender Basses Musical Youth Nile Rodgers’ ‘Hitmaker’ 1962 Fender Stratocaster 1963 Fender Stratocaster 10 Great Golden Era Tones
Introduction The Birth Of The Jazzmaster & Jaguar Thurston Moore’s Jazzmaster 1961 Jazzmaster 1962 Jaguar Kurt Cobain’s Jaguar Johnny Marr’s Jaguar 10 Great Jazzmaster & Jaguar Tones
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Introduction American Beauty La Cabronita Building The Dream Relics and Reissues
LEGENDS of TONE | FENDER
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THE TELECASTER STORY
A PLANK FOR ALL SEASONS The world’s first mass-produced solidbody electric guitar still has the power to delight and deceive, and is enjoying a renaissance in the hands of all kinds of modern rock players WORDS TONY BACON
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humbucker or two, but it’s enough to make the purists wince. Which, incidentally, is often a good thing to do. You’ll know the story of these, too. How quite a few players found the Tele’s neck pickup a weak link, and shoved in a ballsier humbucker to provide some extra meat. The prime example is Keith Richards. In the early 70s, he took his famous 50s Tele, known as Micawber, and swapped its neck pickup for a ‘backwards’ Gibson humbucker. Fender noticed the trend and offered a trio of revised Teles with various pickup combinations: a revised Thinline Telecaster (f-hole, two humbuckers, introduced 1971); Telecaster Custom (regular body, regular bridge pickup, humbucker at neck, 1972); and Telecaster Deluxe (regular body, two humbuckers, 1973). They didn’t set the world on fire at the time, but they’ve been very much back in fashion for a while now, offering a different kind of Tele kick, and Fender today offers several reissues and variations. Of course, Fender is now serious about recreating and reissuing the original classic 50s Teles. I love the story that when they first got going with this idea in the early 80s, they had no original instruments, no company collection, that they could study to help get the details right. Dan Smith, who headed Fender’s electric guitar division from 1981, went along to a vintage dealer with the company’s R&D chief, John Page. They crawled over some old Fenders, taking measurements, snapping photographs, and making paint tests. They also bought some vintage Fenders. “That’s right,” Smith told me with a laugh, “we went
ou have two friends. One of them you’ve known forever and a day, and – now you think about it – they haven’t changed much in all that time. The other one, who you haven’t known quite so long, is a bit of a contrast, and seems to make a habit of changing. You like them both, and that’s hardly surprising, because they’re both Fender Telecasters. That’s the thing about the Telecaster, or should I say Telecasters. On the one hand, there’s the original 50s design. It’s just so unchanged and straightforward. It’s a classic that’s about as simple as a solidbody electric can be. It’s the oldest solidbody electric guitar still going strong – which is not surprising when you consider the fact that it was the first. You know the story well, I’m sure. Back in 1950, before anyone had even thought of rock ’n’ roll, Fender came up with the first commercial solidbody electric. It was uncluttered and plain-speaking, and those qualities are still there today at the heart of the Tele’s appeal. It’s got that dry bite and a twangy, cutting punch that so many great and almost-great players have learned to love and continue to relish. It’s an unfussy, honest, playable guitar. On the other hand, there’s that alternative kind of Tele, that willing guitar-as-testbed that seems to thrive on whatever you or anyone else might throw at it, no matter how far you get from the basic template. This usually takes the shape of chucking on a
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LEGENDS of TONE | Fender
1950 Fender Broadcaster Guitars: The Museum in Umeå, Sweden is the proud owner of this immaculate example of the evolution of the Telecaster
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inally satisfied after the prototyping phase, Leo Fender made his ideas a commercial reality. The Broadcaster was the first mass-produced solidbody electric guitar, an ingenious instrument designed with an engineer’s love of practicality firmly in mind. From its twin pickups with contrasting tone and bolt-on neck with newly installed truss rod, to its feedback-eliminating alder body, every decision made on the drawing board was to prove an enduring and unqualified success. In fact, the only mis-step was the name: as is well-documented, Gretsch had already copyrighted its Broadkaster drum kit, and the Telecaster was born. This example, from the first year of its release, belongs to Guitars: The Museum (www.guitarsthemuseum.com).
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1951 Nocaster with double-Bender Another extremely rare guitar, with a practically unique twin string-bender modification, owned by Guitars: The Museum in Umeå
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rothers Mikael and Samuel Åhdén own Guitars: The Museum (www. guitarsthemuseum.com), an emporium of ultra-rare vintage delights in Umeå, in Northern Sweden, which we urge each and every guitar, bass and amp enthusiast to visit forthwith. In among their astonishing collection, assembled over four decades and counting, is a collection of B-Bender string-bending mechanism-equipped guitars – 41 to be precise – that’s the result of something of an obsession for Samuel. “We heard The Byrds with Clarence White on the B-Bender and we got hooked on that,” remembers Samuel. “We couldn’t understand how he played but we read later that it was a B-Bender mechanism. So we wrote to Gene Parsons and he made us a couple of those: [one of which was] a Les Paul Junior 1955, with the B-Bender. “We have one of the earliest Clarence White B-Benders, which has the original receipt from Gene Parsons when he made the installation,” Samuel adds. “There’s the ’55 Les Paul, and we have some Zemaitis-types as well, and a 1954 Tele also… Oh, and a 1951 Nocaster – that one has a double bender! Completely insane,” he laughs. This is the 1951 Nocaster in question – an instrument so rare, it almost doesn’t make any sense.
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LEGENDS of TONE | FENDER
MILESTONE STRATOCASTERS Since its introduction in 1954, the Fender Stratocaster has evolved, diversified and gone right back to the beginning! Here are nine guitars that chart the development of the model right up to the present day WORDS MICK TAYLOR
1955-’58 FENDER STRATOCASTER
1959-’63 FENDER STRATOCASTER
1964-’65 FENDER STRATOCASTER
The plastics changed progressively to ABS from the previous, more brittle polystyrene; bodies became predominantly alder from mid-1956. Pickups moved gradually from Alnico III magnets to Alnico V, the ‘V’ neck shape was introduced, then phased out by 1958 when the Three-Colour Sunburst was brought in. Clapton’s 1956 ‘Brownie’ sold at auction in 1999 for $497,500. His retired and iconic ’56/’57 ‘Blackie’ sold in 2004, for a record $959,500.
1959 was a watershed year, as ‘slab’ rosewood fingerboards arrived along with three-ply celluloid pickguards. The ’board became a ‘round-lam’ veneer in 1962. During this period, Fender’s Custom Colour chart expanded, and it’s from this period you’ll find the most desirable models in Lake Placid Blue, Fiesta Red, Sonic Blue, Surf Green and so on, and of course, good old Three-Colour Sunburst. Famous fans include SRV, Rory Gallagher, Mark Knopfler, Hank Marvin…
The last of the pre-CBS Strats are often referred to as ‘transition’ Strats. During this period, the headstock logo changed from gold spaghetti-style to block gold. Clay fingerboard dots changed to pearloid, pickguards changed gradually to white plastic, and the ‘grey-bottom’ pickups arrived, still with Alnico V magnets. Robert Cray’s famous Inca Silver Strat is a ’64, while Bob Dylan’s Sunburst 1964 Newport Strat sold in 2013 for $965,000 (with all pre-transition specs).
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THE STRATOCASTER STORY
1968-’71 FENDER STRATOCASTER By now, the Strat’s headstock had enlarged, and the blocky black logo had arrived. Bodies became less contoured and heavier, finishes got thicker (both more so in the mid-1970s). Three-bolt necks appeared in 1970. It was all a bit regrettable… except many artists had great success with these guitars! Hendrix’s ’68 ‘Woodstock’ Strat (sold in 1990 for £198,000 and again for $1.3m in 1993), Blackmore’s ’68, Malmsteen’s ’71… those guitars made history in good ways.
1988 FENDER ERIC CLAPTON STRATOCASTER This was the first official Fender signature model that kicked off a highly successful artist program. The collaboration with Clappers took his famous ‘Blackie’ ’56/’57 as basic inspiration, with a V-shape neck profile and more modern tweaks, including Gold Lace Sensor pickups and a 25dB mid boost circuit. EC used prototypes of the guitar in 1986 on the Eric Clapton & Friends shows, and it became Fender’s most successful signature guitar.
1982 FENDER SQUIER SERIES STRATOCASTER ’62
1987 FENDER AMERICAN STANDARD STRATOCASTER
Facing immense competition from the Asian makers and seemingly unable to make great Strats in the USA, Fender Japan was established. The resulting guitars were the first Squier Series instruments, harking back to original Stratocaster specs and aesthetics in many respects. There was a ’57 maple neck variant and a ’62 rosewood fingerboard model: they were genuine Fender copies, by all accounts.
Following years of turmoil, Fender regained its vision and proudly released the American Standard Strat in ’87. This was a sea-change: four-bolt neck, 22 frets, 9.5-inch radius ’board, two-pivot trem, TBX tone control – it was a Stratocaster that was respectful of the early models, but also had more modern, player-friendly features. Though the spec has evolved, it remains the staple of Fender’s American production to this day.
2006 FENDER CLASSIC SERIES 50S STRATOCASTER
2014 AMERICAN VINTAGE 1954 STRATOCASTER
Fender Japan established a market for high-quality, lower cost, vintage-style Stratocasters through the 1980s and 1990s. Fender took that model and applied it to its wholly owned operation in Ensenada, Mexico, with the Classic Series. They’re the affordable ‘vintage reissue’ Strats of choice to this day, sitting way below American Vintage in terms of price. In 2013, Ensenada debuted its first nitro-finished Classic Series guitars.
60 years after those first, history-changing Stratocasters, Fender honoured them with a replica (for 2014 only). The American Vintage Series in which it sits was upgraded in 2012, and now makes the most historically accurate reissues of old models ever produced outside of its Custom Shop, but at a lower price-point. It’s a neat, full-circle journey for a guitar that is all at once timeless, and yet ever-evolving.
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LEGENDS of TONE | FENDER
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STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN & DOUBLE TROUBLE Couldn’t Stand The Weather
Couldn’t Stand The Weather, 1984
© Alan Messer/ REX Shutterstock
1962 Fender Stratocaster
For arguably his best guitar solo, blues firebrand Stevie Ray Vaughan set his battered Number One Stratocaster to stun, put it through a Tube Screamer, Marshall and Fender amps and a Leslie speaker cabinet, and reminded the early 1980s what a guitar should sound like. Its Sunburst finish was already worn when Vaughan bought it from Ray Hennig’s Heart Of Texas Music shop in Austin, and though he’d refer to it as a ’59, only the pickups were from that year.
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Rory Gallagher Walk On Hot Coals
Irish Tour ’74, 1974
1961 Fender Stratocaster The blues is about pure emotion, and if you want to hear a Strat player giving their all, Irish Tour is a must. Rory’s – said to be the first Strat to arrive in Ireland – was worked almost to destruction. Rory took a Tweed Fender Twin on the road for this famous tour, with a Vox AC30 and Dallas Arbiter Rangemaster Treble Booster: a key element to add bite to the Vox.
TEN GREAT TONES STRATOCASTER
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Yngwie Malmsteen Far Beyond The Sun
Rising Force, 1984
1971 Fender Stratocaster
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Rubber Soul, 1965
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1962 Fender Stratocaster
1960s Fender Stratocaster
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Eric Clapton | Derek And The Dominoes Layla
Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, 1970
1956 Fender Stratocaster
George Harrison | The Beatles Nowhere Man
Jimi Hendrix Little Wing
Axis Bold As Love,
1967
Following his hero Ritchie Blackmore’s lead, neo-classical shredder Yngwie scalloped the frets on his Strat for bigger bends. Named the ‘Duck’ (originating from the Donald Duck sticker and its yellowish hue), it featured two DiMarzio HS-3 pickups and a Fender single coil in the middle position for his landmark debut album, before Yngwie later replaced them with his signature DiMarzios.
Clapton bought the Sunburst, maple-necked ‘Brownie’ in 1967, while he was still with Cream, and it was used on his solo debut and throughout the Layla album. Its most tonesome moment is arguably with a Fender Champ on the title track, which finds Clapton’s Strat in equal billing and harmony with the late Duane Allman.
Harrison and John Lennon acquired Sonic Blue Strats as The Beatles were recording Help!. Though used on You’re Going To Lose That Girl, but here’s probably the most overt example of a Strat on a Beatles recording: George and John are playing their Fenders in unison, with Harrison’s ringing solo; his Strat would have a psychedelic makeover and become known as ‘Rocky’.
Hendrix’s greatest Strat tone? It’s timeless. The sensitive approach and composition of this ballad is majestic and compelling. Which is why so many other great players (SRV, Santana, Satch, Eric Johnson) can’t resist attempting it. That watery warmth to the solo tone is because it was fed through a miniature Leslie speaker built by an Olympic Studio engineer.
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Get The Knack, 1979
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1972 Fender Stratocaster
1957 Fender Stratocaster
Great Strat tones aren’t just leads. Fieger allegedly played every Strat for sale in LA before settling on his Sunburst ’72 – its finish and maple neck inspired by the late frontman’s admiration for Buddy Holly. It certainly makes its mark here on the monster hit he wrote for his band; the Strat bite punches that infectious riff through a Vox AC30.
Murray’s Strat was previously owned by his hero, Free’s Paul Kossoff. It would become Murray’s main guitar through a superb eight-album run for Maiden. He modded it with a black refinish and DiMarzio Super Distortions, but his tone was pretty pure here by his own reckoning: 50-watt Marshall with an MXR Phase 90.
John Frusciante | Red Hot Chili Peppers Under The Bridge
Blood Sugar Sex Magik, 1991
Jeff Beck Nadia
Live At Ronnie Scott’s, 2008
1958 Fender Strat
Fender Custom Shop Signature Stratocaster
He may have played his ’62 Jag for the video, but those tones speak Strat. And Frusciante’s reliance on his ’62 Sunburst Strat after returning to the band for the last time, shows how much the Hendrix fan values the model. The intimate intro here utilises the neck pickup with what could be an MXR compressor.
The players’ player proves just how versatile and surprising the Strat can be in his hands, here playing fingerstyle Indian slide on a Nitin Sawhney composition. Controlling from the guitar, he ran through a relatively clean Marshall JTM45. Effects are minimal, though he did use the lusted-after Klon Centaur.
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Doug Fieger | The Knack My Sharona
Dave Murray | Iron Maiden Powerslave
Live After Death, 1985
LEGENDS of TONE | FENDER
THE COLOUR OF SOUND Fender’s custom colour finishes of the late 1950s and early 60s remain as evocative and desirable as ever. Vintage finish aficionado Curtis Novak tells us more WORDS JAMIE DICKSON
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at the end of them. That meant they were Lucite – acrylic – never nitrocellulose. The reason was the auto companies got complaints from people who were really upset the finishes were cracking and yellowing – so when DuPont came out with those really cool deep colours in the metallics, they made them so they wouldn’t yellow and age. Leo Fender was using auto paint, so he was just following that industry.”
hese days, Curtis Novak is devoted to making high-end pickups, but a few years ago, a large part of his business lay in super-accurate restorations of old guitars – and he was well placed to get it right. His background in spectral analysis gave him a solid grounding in the science of light and colour, while his love of old guitars compelled him to hunt down info on the finishing processes like a detective...
What about the subtler blonde?
“I’ve spent a lot of time studying Fender’s blondes, and the colour can vary depending if they put a [nitro] clear coat on them or not. When I was painting guitars and tried to recreate a given year, you had to know what clear coat was used. Because from the very first Fender blondes up until the late-60s blondes, they used the same white paint [as a base colour], and it is strictly a white, thinned furniture paint. The yellow comes from the clear coat. “Gibson’s TV Yellows are the same way – if you can get past the clear coat, you can see that they were all the same white. Now, the really interesting coincidental point that I hit upon when I was doing this was the year that white ’guard Teles came out was the same year they came out with the Mary Kaye Strat. And the only reason that those Teles stayed as white as the Mary Kaye Strat is they switched the colour of the clear coat that year.”
How did you first become interested in vintage Fender colours?
“Back in the 80s, restorations were a big part of what I was doing. This was before the internet and everything, so there was nowhere to find these colours. I spent a lot of time cold-calling Fender employees and digging through the old DuPont catalogues. I also went to an area where they painted a lot of cars in DuPont colours, and they had a lot of the old 50s books, which had all the old [colour swatch] chips. “Most of the time, Fender used the same colour name as DuPont, but typically they painted the guitars pretty close to when the new models of cars came out, so you could do a bit of matching up.” What did you learn about custom colours?
“Everyone talks nitro, nitro, nitro, but with all of the metallics, the original DuPont colour codes had an L
What difference would that make?
“Part of it’s the colour of the clear coat – when you
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THE colour of sound
These colours were available at a five per cent added cost. Sunburst finishes were standard at no extra cost
1960 CUSTOM COLOURS FOR FENDER FINE ELECTRIC INSTRUMENTS
LAKE PLACID BLUE metallic lucite 2876-l
SHERWOOD GREEN metallic DUCO 2526-H
OCEAN turquoise metallic Lucite 4607-L
TEAL GREEN metallic Duco 4297-H
BLUE ice metallic Lucite 4692-L
FIREMIST GOLD metallic Lucite 4579-L
FIREMIST SILVER metallic Lucite 4576-L
INCA SILVER metallic Lucite 2436-L
SHORELINE GOLD metallic Lucite 2935-L
BURGUNDY MIST metallic Lucite 2936-H
CANDY APPLE RED House of kolor Kandy apple red k-11
DAKOTA red duco 25950-H
FIESTA RED duco 2219-H
SHELL PINK duco 2371
SEAFOAM GREEN duco 2253
SURF GREEN duco 2461
DAPHNE BLUE duco 2804
SONIC BLUE duco 2295
tint: it’s like tinted sunglasses and there’s some depth to it. When you tint the white, it’s one-dimensional.”
open up a can of really old nitrocellulose, it’s like tea – a dark tea or a motor-oil colour in the can. But when you open up a tin of modern nitrocellulose, it looks like a light olive oil. And, over time, the way it ages differently has an influence – for example, a yellowing finish really deepens a shoreline gold. “With a clear coat that doesn’t darken, you end up with more silver. Also, some Sonic Blue guitars got rushed through in ’63 and never got clear-coated, so they stayed a decent blue.”
How you apply the finish, and not just colourmatching, is key to an authentic vintage finish?
“The irony of this is that I really don’t think it’s that hard to do it right. It’s about the process by which the layers go down and the tints come out – so, as the guitar wears, the layers come out right. For instance, the quickest way to tell if a Sunburst is right is if you watch. As a Strat wears, it loses the red, then it loses the brown and then the last thing to go, before it turns dirty, is the yellow – because the yellow was under the Fullerplast [a sealer/undercoat]. And you can spot so many bad [imitation vintage] Sunbursts because they don’t spray the yellow under the sealer. It doesn’t hold true and it doesn’t wear right and it doesn’t age right.”
What’s the key to achieving the authentic Fender blonde finish?
“The reason some replicas don’t look right is sometimes they tint the white [base coat] to get the colour right – but you lose the 3D effect. The clear coat should lay over the white finish, and that’s the
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LEGENDS of TONE | FENDER
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american Beauty
But despite the painstaking push for accuracy in most areas, other details of the new American Vintage guitars deliberately parted with tradition. “From late ’56 to the early part of ’58, a lot of those original guitars had V necks – but I made the decision not to do the V necks on the reissues,” Smith recalls. “When we were out talking to players, either they liked a V neck or they didn’t – but the C profile neck… anybody could play that shape. Even guys that liked V-necks could play one and not be bothered by it. So I didn’t do a V-neck on the ’57 Strat, and that was one concession to modern times. “The main thing that we wanted to do was to recreate the vibe and make them sound as authentic as possible – but really just prove to people that we could make a really good guitar.”
Show Time American Vintage range, too, including a ’52 Tele, ’62 Precision Bass and ’62 Jazz Bass.
Devil In The Detail With the concept for the reissues agreed, Smith and the team faced their next problem: how to make them. Surprisingly, in 1981, nobody at Fender had accurate blueprints for the 50s and 60s guitars they wanted to recreate, because detailed technical drawings for each year’s models weren’t made as a matter of course until CBS acquired Fender. “In order to get it right we had to go out and look at the real stuff because we couldn’t just go off of somebody’s memories,” Smith recalls. “So John Page [renowned Custom Shop master builder, who was then in R&D] and I went to visit a dealer that I knew in DeKalb, Illinois, who had a store called Ax-InHand – Larry Henrikson was the guy. He had one of the largest collections of all brands – but a lot of Fender guitars. “So, in the middle of the winter, we visited this place right outside of Chicago and spent 11 or 12 hours there. We took pictures and measurements and looked at over 200 Fenders. We also bought a December 1960 Strat that was close enough to a ’62 – a beautiful guitar – and two P-Basses… We bought guitars close to the years that we were trying to reproduce, so we had our own reference.” After Smith and Page had completed their research, they set about sourcing authentic vintage components: from cloth-covered wire and phenolic pickguards to old-spec capacitors and Kluson-style machineheads. Ironically, the latter had to be sourced from copyists in Asia because Kluson was on the ropes and was no longer making high-quality units.
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The first indications were good. Dan Smith took pre-production prototypes to trusted dealers, who liked what they saw. Thanks to intensive re-training in the factory, the quality of the new instruments was much better. Things weren’t perfect, but Fender was making good guitars again. Now the real litmus test remained: the June 1982 NAMM show in Chicago. “It [the vintage reissue] was the buzz of the whole show,” recalls George Blanda, who would later head up R&D for Fender. “There might have been a few hardcore collectors saying, ‘Oh, they did this detail wrong’ but the general attitude was very positive. It was almost like, ‘The older Fenders were from the dark days. But these vintage guitars – these are cool.’ It was a big step in the right direction.” Over in the UK, Doug Chandler was similarly impressed. “I think we saw them pretty much as soon as they came out in the UK,” he says. “As soon as Fender had them we got them, and we were suitably knocked out. There was no rocket science: it was just doing the thing properly.” “The reception at the trade show was everything you could ever hope for,” Dan Smith recalls. “I was on cloud nine after that because it was accepted that it was the right thing to do. Back at the factory, it still felt like two steps forward, one step back – but little by little we made progress,” he adds. “It wasn’t until the middle of ’83 the plant was finally running the way we wanted it to. But by that point in time, we were making some really nice guitars.” In 1985, CBS sold Fender outright to a management buyout team led by Bill Schultz. Fender’s return to making quality guitars had begun, and its pride was on the way to being restored. It seems fitting that those seminal, early designs are what lit the way to the company’s modern-day confidence and success.
LEGENDS of TONE | FENDER
Old Soul There’s something indefinably cool about a beautiful old guitar. Even when it’s a new one. Confused? Join us as we tumble through the looking glass to discover how the Custom Shop brings the authentic aura of vintage Fenders to guitars built only yesterday…
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to pay homage to our heritage.’ And they said, ‘No, these are new…’” 20 years on, the process has been refined to the degree where it has become a craft in its own right and one that has been widely emulated by other makers. Naturally, Fender Custom Shop builders insist they still do it the best. They’ve certainly had plenty of practice – most of the orders the Custom Shop receives today are for highly accurate reissues, many of which will feature some degree of obvious relic’ing. A number of grades of wear are offered, from the barely-breathed-on New Old Stock, to the exquisitely weatherbeaten Heavy Relic guitars conjured up by past masters of the art such as John Cruz, Todd Krause and Dale Wilson. Although many of the processes involved remain secret, here Mike Lewis lifts the lid on some of the meticulous – and surprisingly inventive – methods involved in making brand-new old guitars at the Corona Custom Shop…
he allure of Fender’s golden-era guitars hasn’t waned over the decades – if anything the desire to experience the magic of old Strats and Teles has only increased with the passing years. As the value of original vintage instruments climbs ever higher, the Custom Shop has devised intricate techniques to make newly built guitars sound and feel as if they had graced stages for decades. Relic’ing – the process by which luthiers simulate the natural wear and tear that guitars undergo during their lifetime – was debuted by Fender in the mid-90s. Mike Lewis recalls the moment he set eyes on the first Relics built by Fender, which caught even seasoned Fender staff off guard. “It was in 1995 at the NAMM show. John Page was here and I was running the entire guitar division at the time. And so I was at the NAMM show, and the Custom Shop at that time was notorious for bringing in their stuff at the last minute. And as the hours were going by in the days before the show when we were setting up, a few pieces would show up on the wall and then another one. But on the morning of the show, which opened at nine, there were still some empty hooks on the Custom Shop wall. And I asked John Page, ‘What’s going on with these two hooks?’ – and he says, ‘Ah, that’s okay, we’re bringing them in now.’ So, I went off and I came back and I saw a Mary Kaye Strat and a Nocaster. Those were relics – the first ones. And here I am, the guy in charge of the entire guitar division and I didn’t even know they were doing this. That was how close to the chest it was. So I said, ‘Wow, you brought some actual vintage guitars
Recreating vintage Fender guitars is a big part of what the Custom Shop does today. How long has that been in demand?
“It’s always been a big deal. I mean, even before Fender came out with those reissues in ’82 it was a big deal: people asked for it and asked for it and asked for it – ‘Please reissue the 50s and 60s instruments.’ Then Fender did in ’82, and it was huge. To be honest with you, when people order stuff it’s primarily that. It’s primarily based on some sort of vintage platform.” How many original vintage guitars do you inspect in order to get the details right?
“We do it all the time. I personally have done a lot
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