Tag: features

In celebration of the 50th “birthday” of its famous Stratocaster model, Fender has taken the reissue concept to new heights.

And why not? Arguably the most popular guitar – electric, acoustic, you name it – ever built, the Stratocaster is the epitome of a pop music legend, and a huge part of Fender’s history and lore.

Fender’s latest ode to its own, the Custom Shop 50th Anniversary 1954 Stratocaster, made its debut at the January ’04 NAMM show, just four months after the idea was pitched by Mike Tonn, Marketing Manager for Electric Guitars and Basses at the company’s Arizona headquarters.

“People have asked us over the years to make a ’54 Strat,” said Tonn. “Although we have made ‘versions‘ of the ’54 in the past, they were never vintage-correct due to the fact that the knobs, pickup covers, pickguard material, and switch tip were very different back then, and tooling can be costly. Unless we were thinking of adding a ’54 Stratocaster to the American Vintage series, it just did not make sense. But, as we sat to discuss what we wanted to do to commemorate the 50th anniversary, we all knew it was time.”

And at first, the idea met with a little resistance…

“I didn’t really want to [have the Custom Shop take on the project], because we’d already done a ’54 reissue,” admits Mike Eldred, Custom Shop Marketing Manager. “But once Dan Smith told me they were having original parts duplicated, I thought ‘Okay, we could make it cool. Let’s see how far we can take it.’”

And take it they did. From a special form-fit case to larger-diameter pickup magnets, designers went to great lengths to ensure the kind of attention to detail that could be appreciated by even the most curmudgeonly of sticklers.

“We knew we could do it,” Eldred said. “But the problem with a Fender from 1954 is if you laid out four of them in front of you, no two would be alike. There would be small variations. So we took one apart and based the 50th Anniversary model on it.”

That one was #0100, belonging to Richard Smith, renowned Fender expert and author of Fender: The Sound Heard ’Round the World.

In sheer mechanical terms, the new reissue has a nitrocellulose-lacquered, two-piece ash body (in the Custom Shop’s “Closet Classic” style in two-tone sunburst) with offset glue seam, one-piece U-shaped maple neck with 25.5″ scale and 7.25” radius, synchronized tremolo with “ash tray” bridge cover, nickel/chrome hardware, bone nut, documentation, and the form-fit case. The degree of finish aging depends on the finisher, but it’ll typically have a few small dings, checked finish, oxidized hardware, and aged plastic parts.

“Mike [Tonn] even got his hands on an original strap and sent it to one of our suppliers to see if they could replicate it,” Eldred noted.

Because the guitar is a Master Built model, each carries subtle differences determined by the individual builder. This lends each a unique element that in a way harkens back to the variations in the originals – perhaps a slightly different body contour or different blend on the neck, etc. But other parts are just like they were in ’54.

“Jackplate holes, the tremolo cover plate with round holes, pickguard dies, and the fiber dies, all used the original templates,” said Eldred. “We even hand-stamped the serial number on the trem cover plate. Roger Centeno, who was hired at Fender in 1964, did the cover plates himself.”

They even made sure they had the correct typeface on the control knobs.

Dan Smith, V.P. of Fender’s guitar R&D, also notes they were particularly diligent in regard to the plastic parts.

“One of the myths surrounding the first Stratocasters is that the plastic parts were made from Bakelite,” he said. “Bakelite is a trade name for a synthetic resin made from formaldehyde and phenol, the end result being Phenolic. In its raw state, it’s a translucent amber color and fillers like cotton linen and wood are added, along with coloring agents. Since it’s amber in color, it does not lend itself to being used for anything white; darker ivory is as close as it can get. Plus, it cannot be injection-molded; it can only be cast or compression molded.

“So we procured original ’54 Strat plastic parts and [had] them tested by the best laboratory in Southern California,” he said.

That means the 50th Anniversary Strat‘s knobs, pickup covers, switch cap, and tremolo cap are made of high-styrene ABS, and the pickguard is .070” PVC.

“The end result is a tribute reissue in which the case, strap, collateral materials and guitar have all been faithfully replicated for the first time ever,” Tonn said.

Not surprisingly, the guitar has been quite popular. Though Fender won’t divulge numbers, Eldred says orders have exceeded their expectations.

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This article originally appeared in VG November 2004 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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The exotic figuration of Hawaiian koa wood on this Martin 0-28K from 1923 has a visual appeal that matched the exotic sound of Hawaiian music in the 1920s, and koa guitars accounted for a significant part of Martin’s sales through that period.

Koa guitars played a larger role in Martin history, introducing steel strings to the line and changing the company’s market from classical guitars and mandolins to modern steel-stringed guitars.

Most guitar histories cite the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 as the beginning of a Hawaiian music craze that swept the nation, but American audiences and American guitar makers had been aware of Hawaiian instruments and musicians for 20 years before the movement took off. Recordings of Hawaiian musicians were made as early as 1899, and Hawaiian performers appeared at a number of fairs and expositions prior to the Pan-Pacific, including Chicago (1895), Buffalo (1901), Portland (1905) and Seattle (1909).

Awareness of koa guitars with steel strings goes back even farther. American instrument makers had steel-string instruments thrust upon them with the mandolin craze that began in 1880, but they resisted the idea of steel-string guitars. The prevailing belief, as expressed in the 1894 Sears Roebuck catalog, was that a spruce top simply could not withstand the extra tension of steel strings. That same catalog noted how the Hawaiians had found a solution; their koa-topped instruments were in fact strong enough to handle steel strings.

Not all makers subscribed to the belief that steel and spruce couldn’t work together. Separate from the influence of Hawaiian music, in Chicago, the Larson Brothers were making Maurer-brand steel-string flat-tops with spruce tops by the turn of the century. They solved the problem of extra tension with stronger bracing rather than stronger wood. Not far away, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Orville Gibson made guitars with a self-supporting arched top and strung them with steel.

Through 1915, in an era dominated by the mandolin, Martin was well on its way to becoming a mandolin company. From 1898 to 1915, mandolin production slightly surpassed guitars (4,408 mandolins compared with 4,209 guitars). In 1915, the company made 302 mandolins and only 162 guitars.

Thanks to performances by Hawaiian musicians at the Pan-Pacific Exhibition, the market for guitars surged in 1915, but the new style of Hawaiian playing, with a steel bar, simply would not work with gut strings; a Hawaiian guitarist had to have a steel-stringed guitar.

At that point, it was clear to Frank Henry Martin, grandson of the founder and great-grandfather of the current CEO, that the classical-guitar market could no longer support Martin, and the company gave Hawaiian music its undivided attention. Within a year of the Pan-Pacific Exhibition, Martin had ukuleles on the market. Also in 1916, Martin began producing steel-string guitars under contract with the Ditson company and all-koa Hawaiian models for Southern California Music. It would be 15 years before Martin incorporated one of the special Ditson models – the dreadnought – into the regular Martin line, but the koa guitars were a different matter. It took only one year from the first SCM koas for Martin to offer a koa model under the Martin brand.

To make the biggest splash with its entry into the Hawaiian guitar market, Martin chose its most popular size, the 131/2″-wide Size 0, and trimmed it with Style 28 ornamentation including the distinctive herringbone border around the top.

After making six 0-28Ks in 1917, Martin temporarily abandoned the model and introduced the plainer, less expensive (and thus more likely to sell) 0-18K. A 00-size in Style 18 was added a year later, and a 000-28K a year after that. In 1921, the 0-28K rejoined the line.

This 1927 example has a standard nut and standard frets. Like virtually all Martins before 1929, the saddle is aligned perpendicular to the strings, so this model could easily be converted to Hawaiian-style by simply replacing the standard nut with a high nut to raise the strings off the fingerboard. By 1925, Martin was listing a Hawaiian version, with a flat fingerboard, flush frets, and a high nut as an option. When Martin replaced the pyramid-end bridge in ’29, the standard models had the bridge slightly angled.

Martin’s koa models jump-started overall interest in Martin guitars, as the company’s production immediately tripled from 181 in 1916 to 598 in 1917. In 1919, production topped 1,000. The first non-Hawaiian Martin steel-string, the all-mahogany 2-17, debuted in ’22, and Martin’s annual guitar production topped 2,000 that year. The koas remained strong through the ’20s; from 1927 to ’29, the 0-28K outsold the regular 0-28.

Steel strings began working their way across the Martin line, starting with the mahogany-body Styles 17 and 18. By the end of the ’20s, the standard bracing on a Martin was strong enough for steel strings. With the larger dreadnought body waiting in the wings, Martin was ready to take advantage of the guitar’s rise to prominence in the 1930s. However, the koa models that had brought the company to that point were not faring so well. Resonator guitars, introduced by the National company in 1927, were significantly louder than koa instruments, and they quickly dominated the Hawaiian market. With the advent of electric guitars in 1932, most Hawaiian guitarists went electric, making acoustic Hawaiian guitars obsolete.

With no demand from Hawaiian players and with larger-bodied instruments beginning to dominate the guitar market, Martin stopped production of the 0-28K after 1931; total production of the model was 641 (including one straggler in ’35). The 0-18K lasted through ’35, with total production of 3,132.

The pleasing tone of koa wood has given the 0-18K and 0-28K an appeal beyond Hawaiian music, and some owners have converted Hawaiian models to standard setup. Installing a nut, radiusing the fingerboard, re-setting the neck, and rerouting the saddle slot typically does not increase the value beyond the cost of the repair work, but it does make the guitar more versatile. As a display piece, a nicely figured 0-28K continues to be one of the most beautiful of Martin’s standard guitar models.

Special thanks to Richard Johnston.

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This article originally appeared in VG July 2010 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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The Fender Precision Bass was the first commercially successful solidbody electric bass. Played somewhat like a guitar and sporting a fretted neck, the “P-Bass” won over players in almost every genre who previously had to contend with the cumbersome upright bass.

In its original configuration, the instrument, introduced in 1952, had a maple neck with a Telecaster-like headstock, 34″ scale, non-beveled ash body in a blond/butterscotch finish with a black Bakelite pickguard that covered most of the upper body (including both cutaway horns), a strings-through-the-body bridge, and a single-coil pickup. The Volume and Tone controls were mounted on a small chrome plate (also like the Telecaster) and the jack was on the side of the body.

In ’54, Fender beveled the body of the P-Bass, following in the footsteps of the then-new Stratocaster guitar. The contours – forearm bevel on the front of the body, “belly cut” in the back – accompanied a new yellow-to-dark-brown sunburst finish, and a white pickguard. The bass could still be ordered in blond (a lighter tint than the original from ’52), and Dupont colors became an option two years later.

In mid 1957, Fender gave the Precision a dramatic makeover, turning it into what became the final configuration of the standard model. It debuted with a headstock shape that was more Strat-like, and a smaller pickguard made of gold-anodized aluminum and extended to house the controls knobs along with its new top-mounted input jack. Strings were now routed through the bridge/tailpiece instead of through the body, and the chrome pickup and bridge covers had been restyled. Finally, the pickup became the famed split unit with two polepieces for each string, wired to eliminate hum.

The front cover of Fender’s 1957 catalog displayed the rework with a line drawing rather than a photo, and the instrument shown inside was the transition/1954-’57 variant!

The late ’50s beget other changes to the standard P-Bass; a year after the restyled model debuted, the two-tone sunburst finish became a three-tone with a reddish tint between the yellow and brown. In ’59 it (along with most instruments in the Fender line) was given a thick rosewood (“slab”) fingerboard with pearl-dot fret markers, and the anodized-aluminum pickguard was replaced by one made of plastic tortoiseshell. The 1960 Precision shown here not only exhibits these updates, but was once owned by Bill Black (1926-1965), a Memphis musician who backed Elvis Presley along with guitarist Scotty Moore early in the King’s career. Black’s exuberant, percussive slap style on upright was critical to the advent of rockabilly, but once drummer D.J. Fontana became a member of Presley’s band, Black also began to play a Precision.

Black and Moore left Presley in September of 1957, and the bassist assembled Bill Black’s Combo, in which he used newer-style Precision basses. That band garnered an instrumental hit with “Smokie, Part 2,” had eight tunes in the Top 40 between 1959 and ’62, and served as an opening act on the Beatles’ first tour of the U.S. Black did not participate, however, as he was battling a brain tumor; he died during surgery to remove it.

In the decades since its introduction, the Precision has been through many variants – two-pickup models, active circuitry, signature models, etc. But, improvements in hardware, electronics, and manufacturing techniques aside, today it still looks and sounds much like it did in 1957, and remains a definitive example of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” instrument.

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This article originally appeared in VG December 2011 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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