Famous Guitars: The Fender

Guitars have in one form or another been around for thousands of years. There are paintings in Egyptian tombs showing instruments which are similar. For all those thousands of years, instrument making has been a specialised art, and the best instrument makers were students of music themselves.

In the twentieth century all that changed. A new notion of electronic music opened the way to new instruments and new composers. Music could be made from equipment which was not an instrument at all in any previous definition of the term. Even the BBC had it’s own radiophonic workshop where they made music from everyday sounds, processed, played backwards and generally manipulated to the point where the mundane was transformed into the extraordinary. Those involved were primarily musicians, but there was a new need in the music world, for technicians.

Once such was Clarence Leonidas Fender an electronics technician whose company, Fenders Radio service provided repairs for electronic devices of all kinds, including audio and musical instrument amplifiers. His chief interest was in the inadequacies of musical instrument amplifiers and so in the 1930′s he began to build some of his own. By the 40′s he had set up, with a partner, a business to design and manufacture electronic instruments and in 1946 he opened the Fender Electric Instrument Company. Electric guitars had been around since the 1920′s but Fender’s Broadcaster (as the Telecaster was first known) was the very first mass produced solid body electric guitar.

Introduced in 1949, the Telecaster was an an innovation. Rather than a single, hand crafted instrument, it was built on an assembly line from mass produced parts. A bolt on neck made servicing simpler (the neck could easily be removed and replaced) and electronics were easily accessed behind a control plate. The sound of the telecaster was both bright and warm depending on the pickup selected, a feature which made it very versatile and suited to all styles of music, from Country to Rock and Jazz.

The Telecaster has been the guitar of choice for many famous musicians: George Harrison used a custom built rosewood telecaster on the Beatles ‘Let is Be’ album, and most famously Jimmy Page used a 1958 Telecaster (which he painted himself) on the first Led Zeppelin albums and also for the solo in ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

In 1954 Fender introduced the Stratocaster. With it’s sleeker, contoured shape the stratocaster was designed to be well balanced when used in a standing position, something which made it popular with Buddy Holly, an early fan. The company was a huge success. A brilliant marketing campaign showed the young and beautiful jumping out of planes, surfing and generally having a good time, all while attached to a Stratocaster or Jazzmaster guitar. As a result Fender became the most successful electric guitar manufacturer in the world.

In 1965 Leo Fender sold his companies to CBS. Although this seemed, at first, to be a positive move, costs were cut and there was a general reduction in quality. The company suffered from competition; copies of their guitars were being manufactured cheaply and in large numbers in the Far East. In 1985 the President of CBS Musical Instrument Division lead a buyout in which the employees purchased Fender from CBS. Today Fender’s top of the range guitars are still manufactured in California while the new Fender Corporation also owns Squier who manufacture lower priced versions of Fender guitars in the Far East using cheaper electronics. So, if you are looking for a truly high quality instrument in the Fender tradition, where do you go?

After selling his companies in 1965, Leo Fender went on making guitars. His final company G&L guitars sells instruments which, though based on the earlier Fender designs are produced in small numbers, allowing for greater customisation. Other innovations, such as Magnetic Field Design pickups (which allow the player to set the output on a per string basis) make these highly sought after instruments.

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John Blackwood -
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