Fender Jazzmaster

The Fender Jazzmaster is an electric guitar designed as a more expensive sibling to the Fender Stratocaster. First introduced at the 1958 NAMM Show, it was initially marketed to jazz guitarists, but found favor among surf rock guitarists in the early 1960s. Its appearance is similar to the Jaguar, though it is tonally and physically different in many technical ways.

Features

The contoured "offset-waist" body was designed for comfort while playing the guitar in a seated position, as many jazz and blues artists prefer to do. A full 25½" scale length, lead and rhythm circuit switching with independent volume and tone controls, and a floating tremolo with tremolo lock, were other keys to the Jazzmaster's character. The tremolo lock can be manually activated to keep the entire guitar from going out of tune if one string breaks. The Jazzmaster also had an extra-long tremolo arm. The bridge and tremolo construction is very different from that of the Stratocaster and gives the Jazzmaster a different resonance and generally less sustain.

Fender Telecaster

The Fender Telecaster, colloquially known as the Tele /ˈtɛli/, is the world's first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar. Its simple yet effective design and revolutionary sound broke ground and set trends in electric guitar manufacturing and popular music. Introduced for national distribution as the Broadcaster in the autumn of 1950, it was the first guitar of its kind manufactured on a substantial scale and has been in continuous production in one form or another since its first incarnation.

Origins

The Fender Telecaster was developed by Leo Fender in Fullerton, California in 1950. In the period roughly between 1932 and 1949, several craftsmen and companies experimented with solid-body electric guitars, but none had made a significant impact on the market. Leo Fender's Telecaster was the design that finally put the solid-body guitar on the map.

Fender had an electronics repair shop called Fender's Radio Service where he first repaired, then designed, amplifiers and electromagnetic pickups for musicians—chiefly players of electric semi-acoustic guitars, electric Hawaiian (lap steel) guitars, and mandolins. Players had been 'wiring up' their instruments in search of greater volume and projection since the late 1920s, and electric semi-acoustics (such as the Gibson ES-150) had long been widely available. Tone had never, until then, been the primary reason for a guitarist to go electric, but in 1943, when Fender and his partner, Clayton Orr "Doc" Kauffman, built a crude wooden guitar as a pickup test rig, local country players started asking to borrow it for gigs. It sounded shiny and sustaining. Fender was intrigued, and in 1949, when it was long understood that solid construction offered great advantages in electric instruments, but before any commercial solidbody Spanish guitars had caught on (then small Audiovox company apparently offered a modern, solidbody electric guitar as early as the mid-1930s), he built a better prototype.

Fender Telecaster Custom

Fender Telecaster Custom is a model of electric guitar made by Fender. This model should not be confused with the "Fender Custom Telecaster" model manufactured between 1959 and 1968, which only differs from a standard Telecaster in having a bound body. Ever since the release of the Telecaster Custom the market generally refers to the guitar as the "1972 Custom", indicating the year this model was originally released.

History

During the 1950s and early 1960s Fender's twangy single-coil sound enjoyed considerable popularity. This began to wane by the mid-1960s as new stars like Eric Clapton and Mike Bloomfield plugged their humbucker-equipped Gibsons into over-driven Marshall amplifiers. Many players began to look for a thicker, creamier sound that the standard Telecaster didn't deliver. To achieve this sound, many players replaced the standard single coil pickups on their Telecasters and installed aftermarket humbuckers (a good example of this is Andy Summers' modified Telecaster). Another reason for replacing the Telecaster neck pickup was that many players felt it lacked a "Rock and Roll vibe". The original single coil neck pickup excels in jazz and blues tones but players felt replacing it with a more powerful humbucker pickup would give the Telecaster a second rock voice to match the Telecaster's popular bridge pickup.