Vintage Fender Telecaster- The Little Crude Wooden Guitar that Could
In todays vintage guitar collections the vintage Fender Telecaster happens to be one of the most sought after vintage guitars. Reason being that it was the first major solid bodied electric guitar to be produced. Sure there were a lot of prototypes of the electric guitar since the 20′s, but the Fender Telecaster was the one that set the standard in solid bodied electric guitars.
It took Leo Fender around 17 years of experimentation to produce the better known as “Tele”. The first prototype name of the Telecaster was the Esquire. The Esquire entered the scene in 1950 and had a short life span. Only around 50 guitars were manufactured and distributed then recalled due to manufacturing errors. This however did not discourage Leo.
He worked on the guitars kinks and updated some features and re-released the guitar later that year and renamed it the Fender Broadcaster. Leo’s luck however still was poor. The Gretsch Company would state that Leo violated their copyright of “Broadkaster” drum line and the Broadcaster would have to be renamed.
Leo once again would not be shaken by this set back and he renamed his guitar after the newly popular meduim, the television. Hence the Fender Telecaster. The Telecaster repaid him for all of his years of trial and error. It hit the market and caused a frenzy in the guitar world. The once dismissed solid body electric guitar now was the new thing. Leo had changed music history forever.
With the release of the Telecaster the new players not only like the sound, but liked the way that the guitar was put together. It was rather simple to fix. The components were not individually constructed like most guitars at the time, but were mass manufactured. You would think with such a strategy that the performance of the guitar would suffer, but it did not. The Telecaster was sawed and routed from slabs, not hand-carved, necks were bolted and not glued, and the fretboards was a single piece with the neck not separate. Just a few examples of many neat features…
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