Vintage Fender Guitars, Basses, Amps.
Introduction and General Specs.
Overview of collecting vintage Fender guitars, basses and amps. General specifications, serial numbers, Fender vintage guitar cases. Private vintage guitar collector.
Picture Gallery, Fender section.
Contact the vintage guitar info guy.
September 1952 Fender calendar.
- Introduction
- Serial Number/Year Identification
- General Fender Parts & Detail Specs
- Fender Cases
- Fender Custom Colors
- Reissue and Original Fender Vintage Parts Comparison
- Models: Fender Electric Model Info
- Models: Fender Acoustic Flattop Info
- Inside a 1954 Fender Stratocaster.
- Inside a 1958 Fender Jazzmaster.
Inside a 1951 to 1969 Fender Telecaster video.
- Fender Electric Guitar Schematics
- Vintage Fender Guitar Pickup Specs
- Fender Amplifiers
DVD video version of this web page for Stratocasters and Telecasters:
Introduction.
- For most collectors, pre-CBS (pre-1966) Fender vintage guitars and amps are the desirable ones. Although CBS purchased Fender (officially) on January 3rd 1965, it took some time till the guitars changed (though by mid 1964, six months before CBS bought Fender, things were already "on the way down"). By the end of 1965, the general look and feel of the Fender guitars had changed significantly. All collectors feel the quality of their instruments and amps suffered as CBS employed more "mass production" manufacturing processes to the Fender guitars. The "large peghead" (starting in late 1965) as used on the Fender Stratocaster was one example of the (bad) changes to come. The "custom contoured" bodies Fender was famous for no longer were as sculped and sleek. Newer (and less attractive) plastics were used for the pickguards. Pearl fingerboard inlays replaced the original "clay" dots. Indian rosewood replaced the beautifully figured Brazilian rosewood on the fingerboards. And by 1968, polyurathane replaced the original nitrocellulose lacquer that was used from Fender's conception. By early 1971 the party was truely over. Fender now employed the infamous "3 bolt neck" and one piece die cast bridge on the Strat, ruining it's tone and feel. Many other models suffered the same miserable fate of being over mass-produced and cheapened by corporate zealots.Because of this, Fender's most innocent era of the 1950's is their most collectible. This decade produced guitars with one-piece maple necks, single layer pickguards, thin "spaghetti" logos, and tweed cases that seem to capture collectors the most.
The early 1960's Fenders with "slab" rosewood fingerboards are also collectible, but not to the extent of the earlier 1950's maple-neck era. Of the rosewood fingerboard models, the "slab" fingerboard (1958/mid-1959 to August 1962) variants are more desirable than the "veener" fingerboard (August 1962 and later) pre-CBS models. The "transistion" era (late summer 1964 to December 1965) are the least collectible of the pre-CBS models. This era is known as a "transition" because later summer 1964 to December 1965 was the time when there was a transition from the Leo Fender management to CBS management, and mass-production manufacturing techniques were starting to take a firm hold.
By 1966 (a year after CBS bought Fender), CBS management had really taken hold of Fender's production facilities and incorporated many changes. The sum of of all these changes had a serious effect on Fender guitars as a whole. 1966 brought an era of "large" pegheads, less contoured bodies, and much higher production numbers. CBS looked for ways to cut production time and costs, which generally led to much lower quality. Because of this, 1966 and later Fender instruments are considered far less collectible than vintage pre-CBS Fender guitars.
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