It was renamed again a year later to the Telecaster. The rename was done due to a conflict with Gretch Broadkaster drums. The Precision bass is one of the most popular bass designs to this day. Leo needed an amp to run it through though, so he built the Bassman amp. The most popular guitar ever made and copied. It made the Fender company worth millions and made Leo an icon in the music world.
Fender at this point now had over employees, of them in manufacturing. Randoll not having the resources to purchase the company himself, agreed to find another buyer. In August the Fender Mustang was introduced. CBS began making changes almost immediately. He quit less than two years later over a dispute regarding the quality of an amplifier CBS planned on producing. His departure was due to corporate politics and concerns over quality. Many other long term employees felt quality was taking a back seat since CBS took over.
It was strange. Plenty were decent enough instruments, but few were great instruments. Work on elements such as new pickups and a new bridge was certainly well under way by late Long-held conventions of design and method meant little if anything to Leo, which likely goes a long way in explaining the genesis of an instrument as extraordinary as the Stratocaster.
Perhaps author Tom Wheeler put it best when, in his indispensable history The Stratocaster Chronicles , he asked:. A practical person, he just wanted to build a better guitar. He and his closest staff spent long hours developing and perfecting the new model, which quickly shaped up to be its own instrument rather than an improved version of the Telecaster. The new guitar certainly owed several design elements to its predecessor, though, and as late as early its body shape closely resembled that of the Telecaster.
It had not one or two but three pickups, with switching and controls that created great tonal versatility although, curiously, the switching configuration allowed only three of several possible pickup combinations. This consisted of two then-common paint colors—a brownish-black outer hue called dark Salem, which graduated to a golden inner hue called canary yellow. Sunburst finishes also conveyed the extra advantage of lessening the apparentness of mismatched wood grain in the ash bodies, which typically but not always consisted of two or more pieces glued together.
In response to player feedback on the Telecaster, Randall wanted the new guitar to have some kind of vibrato system, and Leo was eager to better the designs by his former business partner, Doc Kauffman, and by his contemporary, Paul Bigsby. The vibrato system had to offer solid tuning stability without compromising tone, sustain, player comfort and ease of use, and Leo immersed himself in the task with his customary focus.
In this design, the strings actually moved over the bridge on the rollers. Leo invested a great deal of time and money into trying to perfect the system well into before scrapping the entire design and starting over. Randall and his salesmen were chomping at the bit to get the new guitar out, and there was considerable pressure on Leo himself to devise a new Stratocaster vibrato system. Inspired by a gram scale, he hurriedly completed an entirely new design in late in which the whole bridge assembly moved with the strings rather than having the strings move over rollers with the bridge remaining stationary.
The rear of the bridge plate was unanchored and bent slightly upward; the front was fixed to the guitar body with six screws, one in front of each bridge saddle. In the compartment routed into the back of the guitar, the whole assemble was anchored by springs three at first but soon five that attached to the inertia block at one end and an adjustable anchor plate screwed to the forward wall of the cavity at the other end.
Leo and his staff envisioned a steel guitar-like sound with only very slight pitch changes, but his design actually enabled a pitch span of up to three half steps or more. Simply put, it was better than it needed to be, and within a decade or so players would be using it to create swooping, dive-bombing sounds never envisioned at Fender headquarters.
Other Stratocaster innovations included single-coil alnico 3 pickups with staggered-height pole pieces that effectively addressed the varying output of the heavy string gauges in use at the time, and a slanting output jack mounted on the face of the guitar rather than the side. All along as design refinements preceded throughout late and early , Leo and his staff were ably abetted by several western swing guitarists in addition to Gallion and Carson who were happy to field-test Stratocaster prototypes in local nightclubs.
It was a sleekly beautiful instrument bursting with great features and producing full, clear and sparkling tones. In my opinion, they were constantly trying to make a more perfect wheel.
Rod Brakes is a music writer with an expertise in all things guitar-related. Having spent many years at the coalface as a guitar dealer and tech, Rod's more recent work as a journalist covering artists, industry pros, and gear includes writing hundreds of articles and features for the likes of Guitarist magazine, MusicRadar, and Guitar World, as well as contributions for specialist books and blogs.
He is also a lifelong musician. GP logo Created with Sketch. Rod Brakes. Topics Fender. Fender Stratocaster. The Pick Newsletter. Get the latest news, reviews and product advice straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands. Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors.
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