Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works in love all Things tech, and several
Speaker 1: months ago, I did a few episodes about the history
Speaker 1: of Gibson guitars, which had to file for Chapter eleven
Speaker 1: bankruptcy protection not too long ago, and tech Stuff listener
Speaker 1: Greg asked if I could do a similar treatment for
Speaker 1: another famous guitar company, Fender, And so today we're going
Speaker 1: to look at the history of Fender guitars and what
Speaker 1: differentiates Fenders from Gibson guitars. Specifically, we're gonna look at
Speaker 1: the difference between the classic Guitar Showdown, and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of different guitars that Gibson has made. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of different guitars that Fender has made.
Speaker 1: But generally speaking, when you were talking about Fender versus Gibson,
Speaker 1: most to people, I think mean stratocaster from Fender versus
Speaker 1: the less Paul from Gibson. So what the heck makes
Speaker 1: us so different? I'm going to tell you, but not
Speaker 1: right now, because you know how I do. I started
Speaker 1: off with history, So let's talk about the history of Fender.
Speaker 1: So the founder of Fender was Clarence Leonidas Leo Fender.
Speaker 1: He was born on August tenth, nineteen o nine, which
Speaker 1: was a little bit more than a decade after Orville
Speaker 1: Gibson had produced his first musical instrument, which, as I recall,
Speaker 1: was a mandolin. And it was also seven years after
Speaker 1: Kalamazoo businessman form the Gibson Mandolin Guitar manufacturing company back
Speaker 1: in nineteen o two. So by the time Fender was born,
Speaker 1: Gibson was already on its way to becoming a thing,
Speaker 1: although obviously the the era of the electric guitar battles
Speaker 1: was decades away. Uh. Also, Leo was never a musician,
Speaker 1: or at least not a guitarist or a luthier. Uh
Speaker 1: from by trade. Like, he didn't come from a musical
Speaker 1: instrument making background. He kind of fell into that. His parents,
Speaker 1: Monty and Harriet, owned an orange grove in a ranch
Speaker 1: in California, and he went to school in Fullerton, California. Fullerton,
Speaker 1: by the way, is not too far away from Anaheim.
Speaker 1: It's southeast of Los Angeles. When he was eight years old,
Speaker 1: Leo lost his left eye. He got a glass eyes
Speaker 1: a replacement. One biography I read said that he lost
Speaker 1: his eye do to an injury that he suffered in childhood.
Speaker 1: Another one said that he had actually developed a tumor
Speaker 1: behind that. I uh, I don't know which was the
Speaker 1: actual cause, but I do mention it because him losing
Speaker 1: an eye actually plays an important part in his story,
Speaker 1: beyond just coping with you know this this change, uh
Speaker 1: it actually is. You could argue the fact that he
Speaker 1: lost an eye when he was a kid might have
Speaker 1: been what made it possible for him to get into
Speaker 1: making electric guitars. He also attended Junior College in Fullerton.
Speaker 1: He majored in accounting, and in fact, he had no
Speaker 1: formal training and electrical engineering at all, but he did
Speaker 1: have a very keen interest in the subject, and much
Speaker 1: of that interest actually came from working with his uncle,
Speaker 1: whose name is John West or was John West West
Speaker 1: was an auto mechanic, and he also had built his
Speaker 1: own radio, and he was interested in ham radio. So
Speaker 1: Fender became fascinated with radios and began to learn how
Speaker 1: they work, and how do you build a simple radio,
Speaker 1: how are more complex radios built, how do you repair them?
Speaker 1: And He got so good at putting radios together or
Speaker 1: figuring out how to fix a broken radio that he
Speaker 1: ended up opening out a small business in his home
Speaker 1: while he was still in high school. He had a
Speaker 1: little home shop he would work in and just kind
Speaker 1: of take commissions from locals to build or fix radios.
Speaker 1: He took piano lessons as a kid, uh, and later
Speaker 1: he switched to the saxophone briefly, but music really wasn't
Speaker 1: his passion, at least not not producing it himself, so
Speaker 1: he never learned to play guitar, and legend hasn't that
Speaker 1: he didn't even really know how to tune a guitar properly.
Speaker 1: When he graduated in nineteen thirty the country was in
Speaker 1: pretty bad shape. The Great Depression had begun the previous year,
Speaker 1: and so it was a tough time for people to
Speaker 1: get work and to keep work. Fender originally found work
Speaker 1: with a company called the Consolidated Ice and Cold Storage
Speaker 1: Company in Anaheim, California, which sounds like a pretty cool gig.
Speaker 1: That's a pun. In nineteen thirty four, he married a
Speaker 1: woman named Esther class Key. They would stay together until
Speaker 1: she passed away. Uh. He also switched jobs to work
Speaker 1: for the California Highway Department in California, obviously, but government
Speaker 1: budgets would lead to layoffs and his job was one
Speaker 1: of the ones affected. He was one of the people
Speaker 1: who was let go during that that era. So he
Speaker 1: went around looked for another job, and he got one
Speaker 1: as an accountant for a tire company, but that job
Speaker 1: only lasted six months before the tire company also had
Speaker 1: to layoff employees, including Fenders. So while that was going on,
Speaker 1: he was still pursuing his interest with electronics. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't working in that field, but we're still interested
Speaker 1: in it. A local band leader in Fullerton had asked
Speaker 1: Fender to build out a p A system, a public
Speaker 1: address system, so that it could be used for dances.
Speaker 1: And these were dances that were taking place in clubs
Speaker 1: and dance halls in Hollywood. So Fender took the job
Speaker 1: and he built out the p A system, and the
Speaker 1: guy was impressed and it ended up leading to some
Speaker 1: other commission work. And once he lost his position at
Speaker 1: the tire company, when he was no longer able to
Speaker 1: be there accountant, he decided he was going to take
Speaker 1: a risk and go into business for himself. I mean
Speaker 1: after all, he had gone through three different jobs over
Speaker 1: the past few years and felt that maybe it was
Speaker 1: time for him to try and do this on his own. Also,
Speaker 1: by this time it was nineteen thirty nine. It was
Speaker 1: almost a decade after he had graduated, and nine nine
Speaker 1: is sort of the end of the Great Depression. The
Speaker 1: Great Depression, the major downturn was in the first few years,
Speaker 1: like twenty nine to thirty three, and then thirty nine
Speaker 1: was towards the very end of the recovery period where
Speaker 1: the economy was finally getting to the point of pre
Speaker 1: depression levels. So Fender took out a loan for six
Speaker 1: hundred dollars and he set up a company, a little
Speaker 1: store called the Fender Radio Service. It was a repair
Speaker 1: shop in Fullerton, California. He specialized in repairing small electronic
Speaker 1: products like radios, amplifiers, public address systems, but also like
Speaker 1: phonograph some other stuff like that. He began to carry
Speaker 1: records after a while, as in vinyl albums, because he
Speaker 1: saw that there was a market for it and there
Speaker 1: weren't really any record shops in Fullerton, so he said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I sell this equipment. I offered to repair
Speaker 1: this equipment I should sell the media as well, so
Speaker 1: he did, and that started bringing more customers in, and
Speaker 1: then he began to carry other types of products like
Speaker 1: phonographs and and actually sell a lot more radios. Originally
Speaker 1: he was just repairing them, and over time he built
Speaker 1: out public address systems and offered them for rental or
Speaker 1: for sale. There were still a lot of local dances
Speaker 1: and banned performances going on in the area, and so
Speaker 1: that ended up being kind of a regular source of
Speaker 1: income for him. Then he began to build amplifiers, and
Speaker 1: again he had received no formal schooling in any of this.
Speaker 1: He was learning by doing. He was learning by tinkering
Speaker 1: in his shop, putting things together, seeing if they worked,
Speaker 1: adjusting them. It was very interesting to see that this
Speaker 1: guy was largely self taught, so he had developed his
Speaker 1: expertise through experience and through studying what other people had
Speaker 1: built and figuring out how it worked. At this point,
Speaker 1: America was entering World War Two, in fact that it
Speaker 1: did so after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that happened
Speaker 1: in December. Fender, however, was ineligible to be conscripted for
Speaker 1: military service because he had lost an eye. He had
Speaker 1: a glass eye, and it was in this period when
Speaker 1: he would first start working with developing electric guitars. So
Speaker 1: you could argue that it's possible Fender was able to
Speaker 1: pursue his interest in electronics and to start fiddling around
Speaker 1: with working on electric guitars because he had lost his
Speaker 1: eye as a kid, and if he hadn't, he would
Speaker 1: have been conscripted for the United States military and sent
Speaker 1: to fight in World War Two, and who knows what
Speaker 1: would have happened. Then maybe he would have come out
Speaker 1: of it fine, but he might not have taken on
Speaker 1: a job that would have involved electronics after coming back
Speaker 1: from the war, So it's an interesting thing to think about.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen forties, Finder began to work with
Speaker 1: one of his regular customers, who is a guy who
Speaker 1: also owned a radio repair shop. That guy was Clayton
Speaker 1: Doc Kaufman. Kaufman had brought an amplifier for Finder to
Speaker 1: fix at one point, and the two struck up a friendship.
Speaker 1: Doc Kaufman had already made some important contributions to music himself.
Speaker 1: In ninety eight, he applied for a patent. That patent
Speaker 1: has the title Apparatus for producing Tremolo Effects or tremolo
Speaker 1: effects if you prefer tremolo is a wavering effecting whoo
Speaker 1: boo in a musical tone. And so this was a
Speaker 1: patent for a type of tremolo bar sometimes called a
Speaker 1: whammy bar. More appropriately we should call it a vibrato bridge.
Speaker 1: That's the lever that some electric guitars and some other
Speaker 1: instruments have that that the purpose of that lever is
Speaker 1: to introduce this wavering effect. And Kaufman designed a movable
Speaker 1: tail piece that would increase or decrease the tension on
Speaker 1: a string. So when you'd string this musical instrument, and
Speaker 1: it would go through to the bridge at the base
Speaker 1: of the musical instrument, this bar had a little spring
Speaker 1: loaded system connected to that bridge where if you press
Speaker 1: down on the bar, it would increase tension on the strings,
Speaker 1: which would increase the pitch of the string. When it
Speaker 1: was vibrating, it would actually vibrate at a faster frequency.
Speaker 1: If you pulled up on the lever, it would reduce
Speaker 1: the amount of tension on the string and it would
Speaker 1: vibrate more slowly and thus decrease the pitch of the
Speaker 1: vibrating string. Uh So, moving the lever either closer to
Speaker 1: or further from the face of the instrument. You can
Speaker 1: slightly change the tension of the string without having to
Speaker 1: change the tuning, and that's where you get that wavering sound.
Speaker 1: And um, this is where I need to make that
Speaker 1: pedantic clarification. Technically speaking, you create a tremolo effect by
Speaker 1: changing the amplitude of a sound, by changing the volume
Speaker 1: of a sound, by moving the volume up and down
Speaker 1: over time, mike, so kind of like turning up and
Speaker 1: turning down the volume rapidly as a note plays. That's
Speaker 1: technically tremolo. Vibrato is changed by uh, is that wavering
Speaker 1: effect by changing the pitch slightly of a sound, so
Speaker 1: the frequency, not the amplitude. And that's what these these
Speaker 1: apparatus would do. They change the pitch of the of
Speaker 1: the string, and so they were That's why we should
Speaker 1: call him vibrato, not tremolo. But everyone calls him tremolo
Speaker 1: or wammy bars, so it doesn't really matter. I guess
Speaker 1: it ultimately matters what people use as the term, but
Speaker 1: technically speaking, it's not correct. Kaufman had also worked with
Speaker 1: the company Rickenbacker, which was the company that had pioneered
Speaker 1: electric guitars, though these were meant to be lap steel
Speaker 1: electric guitars. Uh. And they were hollow body guitars. They
Speaker 1: weren't solid body guitars, so they weren't the Spanish style
Speaker 1: guitars we typically think of. Those are the ones that
Speaker 1: you know, you would typically have a shoulder strap on
Speaker 1: them and you play it standing up. Uh. The lap
Speaker 1: steel guitars, obviously, as the name suggests, those you would
Speaker 1: play you would sit down. You would have the guitar
Speaker 1: sitting on your lab and you play it as a
Speaker 1: steel guitar. Kaufman and Fender worked together to design a
Speaker 1: phonograph record changer, and they were able to sell that
Speaker 1: design for the Burnsley some of five thousand dollars, and
Speaker 1: with that they decided to go into business together and
Speaker 1: started a new company. They called it K and F Manufacturing.
Speaker 1: Fender continued to operate his radio repair shop at the
Speaker 1: same time, and then the moment of truth. At some point,
Speaker 1: Kaufman and Fender began to discuss the systems that made
Speaker 1: electric guitars work, and the too decide they were going
Speaker 1: to give it a shot. What happened next, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you right after we take this quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor Now, the part of an electric guitar that
Speaker 1: makes it electric ultimately is the pickup. There's some other
Speaker 1: circuitry that's also technically connected to pickups for most electric guitars,
Speaker 1: but the pickup is really the element at play. And
Speaker 1: I talked a bit about these quite a bit actually
Speaker 1: in the Gibson episodes, but I'm gonna go over it
Speaker 1: again here because it is in fact the important element
Speaker 1: of any electric uh stringed instrument. And besides, fenders, pickups
Speaker 1: are different from the pickups that Gibson used. Now, the
Speaker 1: pickup is the part of an electric guitar that creates
Speaker 1: the electric signal that can ultimately be sent out to
Speaker 1: an amplifier and then on two speakers. And there are
Speaker 1: two prevailing theories about what is going on with pickups,
Speaker 1: and they're very similar, but there is a slight distinction
Speaker 1: between the two. Both of the theories say that basically
Speaker 1: the electric guitar pickups work because of electromagnetism. That is
Speaker 1: absolutely the case. It has to be. The pickup has
Speaker 1: one or more permanent magnets with a coil of copper
Speaker 1: wire wrapped around the magnets on a frame that we
Speaker 1: call the bobbin. The purpose of the bobbin is to
Speaker 1: keep the coil stationary with respect to the body of
Speaker 1: the guitar, and a typical bobbin, if you're looking at
Speaker 1: your average electric guitar, has a base plate that attaches
Speaker 1: to the guitar body by some way, typically by screws.
Speaker 1: You have a little plate that screws into the face
Speaker 1: of the guitar and that sits as the base that
Speaker 1: then holds the magnets in place. And then you have
Speaker 1: a top plate that fits on top of those magnets,
Speaker 1: and then this acts as the frame around which you
Speaker 1: can wind the copper coil. Some pickups, like the ones
Speaker 1: Fender would use in the Strato caster, have an individual
Speaker 1: cylindrical magnet under each of the six strings, so each
Speaker 1: string has its own little cylinder underneath it that is
Speaker 1: a magnet um. They look like little poles when you
Speaker 1: take them out of the pickup. Other pickups might have
Speaker 1: a bar magnet. The Gibson P ninety pickup has is
Speaker 1: a bar magnet pickup. Rick and Bocker had horseshoe magnets
Speaker 1: for some of their pickups, but we often see these
Speaker 1: individual cylindrical magnets in most electric guitar pickups, I would
Speaker 1: say at least the ones that Fender made. Anyway, electric
Speaker 1: guitars have metal strings as well, and those strings are
Speaker 1: made out of nickel and steel. Those are feral magnetic materials.
Speaker 1: That means those metals are attracted to magnets. If you
Speaker 1: stick a magnet to a guitar string, you'll feel that
Speaker 1: there's that connection, right, that they're attracted to each other.
Speaker 1: The prevailing explanation about how pickups work says that strumming
Speaker 1: a string causes it to disrupt the magnetic field around
Speaker 1: the pickup, and that in turn induces current to flow
Speaker 1: through the coil technically and induces a difference in voltage,
Speaker 1: which then causes current to flow through the coil. That
Speaker 1: current can be sent out to an amplifier and then
Speaker 1: boosted to go to speakers which play this back. They
Speaker 1: convert that electric signal back into an analog physical uh sound, right,
Speaker 1: the the speakers convert that electric signal into physical movement.
Speaker 1: That then we can hear that physical movement being the
Speaker 1: movement of the drivers inside the speaker. But then there's
Speaker 1: a secondary explanation. It gets a little more precise, and
Speaker 1: this is one that's put forth by organizations like the
Speaker 1: National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It goes a little further.
Speaker 1: That theory states the strings themselves become magnetized because they're
Speaker 1: so close to a permanent magnet and they are ferro
Speaker 1: magnetic material. So maybe you've done the little experiment where
Speaker 1: you take something like a needle and um, it's made
Speaker 1: of a ferro magnetic material, and you rub the needle
Speaker 1: several times against a permanent magnet, and then you move
Speaker 1: the needle over some other ferro magnetic material, maybe other
Speaker 1: needles or pins, and it picks them up. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like that. So according to this explanation, when you
Speaker 1: strum a string, you're really moving a magnet quickly near
Speaker 1: a coil of conductive wire, which is the basis of
Speaker 1: electric motors and dynamos. Right like you you have conductive
Speaker 1: wire and a permanent magnet, and when you move the
Speaker 1: two in relation to each other, it's the same as
Speaker 1: having a fluctuating magnetic field near a conductive wire, and
Speaker 1: that again induces that change in voltage and current to flow.
Speaker 1: Whether you subscribe to the first explanation or you say no, no, no,
Speaker 1: this second one is much more correct. Because of that
Speaker 1: magnetic strings explanation, the result is the same. The result
Speaker 1: is that strumming a string causes this electrical signal to
Speaker 1: pass through the pickup and then move on ultimately through
Speaker 1: the output jack on an electric instrument. Now, I'll talk
Speaker 1: more about pickups and how they play a part with
Speaker 1: harmonics later on in these episodes, because that's a very
Speaker 1: important element in what differentiates a stratocaster from say a
Speaker 1: less Paul Gibson guitar. I was during that first year
Speaker 1: of K and F manufacturing when the two founders produced
Speaker 1: their first electric guitar. Typically it's referred to as the
Speaker 1: Radio Shop guitar. It was a prototype is just meant
Speaker 1: to prove be a proof of concept to make sure
Speaker 1: that they could do this. They were working with a
Speaker 1: very different pickup design. This one was one in which
Speaker 1: the guitar strings would actually pass through the magnetic coil.
Speaker 1: And this was very hard for me to visualize, but
Speaker 1: fortunately there are are uh pictures. There's there's illustrations from
Speaker 1: the patent application for this thing. So I pulled those
Speaker 1: to take a look at them, and one of those
Speaker 1: illustrations shows that the guitar has a kind of a
Speaker 1: raised frame that is is attached to the face of
Speaker 1: the guitar. Think of it's like a it's almost like
Speaker 1: a little raised box that's on the face of the guitar,
Speaker 1: and the strings can pass under the top of that
Speaker 1: box and out the other side. Because the box itself
Speaker 1: on the center, it looks kind of like it's hollow.
Speaker 1: In reality, that boxes housing the pickup, so the strings
Speaker 1: are just passing through the pickup, not overtop the pickup
Speaker 1: as it would in a normal electric guitar. And the
Speaker 1: reason that Fender and Kaufman did this was that they
Speaker 1: said it would produce notes with greater fidelity. You would
Speaker 1: have less interference, less less of a kind of crunchy sound.
Speaker 1: You would be able to hear each note much more
Speaker 1: clearly and distinctly, so you would get a clear, chiming
Speaker 1: kind of note instead of more of, uh, a high
Speaker 1: gain kind of sound. This is also where he gets
Speaker 1: really complicated to try and explain the differences in sound,
Speaker 1: because we don't necessarily have very quantitative ways of describing them,
Speaker 1: but they are certainly you can when you hear it,
Speaker 1: you can definitely tell the difference. Well, this radio shop
Speaker 1: guitar was again improof of concept. They did not plan
Speaker 1: to go forward and make more of these and sell them,
Speaker 1: but they would use it as the basis for a
Speaker 1: Hawaiian style lap steel guitar, and they started selling those.
Speaker 1: They also started building and selling vacuum tube amplifiers and
Speaker 1: they did that for three years. But by nine six,
Speaker 1: World War two had come to an end, and Kaufman
Speaker 1: was nervous. He thought this fledgling company wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to survive in a post war environment, and that there
Speaker 1: was gonna be way too much competition, and that there
Speaker 1: weren't weren't enough customers to go around, so he was
Speaker 1: afraid he would lose his shirt, so he decided to
Speaker 1: bow out. But he and Fender would remain friends for
Speaker 1: the rest of their lives, so there were no hard feelings.
Speaker 1: But he needed to He felt like he wasn't really
Speaker 1: sure this was the right thing for him. Fender, however,
Speaker 1: would stick with it, and he renamed the company the
Speaker 1: Fender Manufacturing Company. And this tends to be when most
Speaker 1: company histories for Fender guitars say this is the birth,
Speaker 1: the nineteen forty six that's the real beginning for Fender.
Speaker 1: Now there's no official documentation to verify the story I'm
Speaker 1: about to say, but the general belief is that the
Speaker 1: first guitar to ever have the Fender f logo on it,
Speaker 1: which is a famous trademark now, it was a custom
Speaker 1: lap steel guitar Fender UH and it was built for
Speaker 1: Leo Fender's friend Noel Boggs in nineteen six. Boggs was
Speaker 1: a steel guitarist lap lap guitar player. He he took
Speaker 1: inspiration from a jazz guitarist named Charlie Christian. Charlie Christian
Speaker 1: actually helped make Gibson guitars famous. He was using a
Speaker 1: Gibson electric guitar and that was a hollow body Gibson
Speaker 1: electric guitar that that Christian was using, and he was
Speaker 1: popularizing this concept of electric guitars. Boggs like the sound
Speaker 1: of the Fender guitars, so he started to take the
Speaker 1: sound of the Fender guitars and the technique of Christian
Speaker 1: and incorporate that. And it was interesting, you know. Charlie
Speaker 1: Christian he worked in the jazz genre of music, whereas
Speaker 1: Noel Boggs was more of a country and Western musician.
Speaker 1: But he started to take some of those techniques from
Speaker 1: jazz music and incorporated into western and that's sort of
Speaker 1: helped really push a genre called Western swing. Boggs was
Speaker 1: not the only person doing this, but he he really
Speaker 1: was one of the pioneers of that genre. It was
Speaker 1: around this time when an old friend Offenders named Don
Speaker 1: Randall played a real important part. Randall had once worked
Speaker 1: for a radio supply shop called Howard Taylor Wholesale Radio
Speaker 1: and that I had often worked with Fenders Radio repair shop,
Speaker 1: and then in Randall went and bought the store he
Speaker 1: worked for, but he ended up selling off that business
Speaker 1: once he got drafted for World War Two, and in
Speaker 1: World War two he served in the Army UH For
Speaker 1: a while he was part of the Army Corps of Engineers,
Speaker 1: and then later on he was part of the Army
Speaker 1: Air Corps, which would of course later evolve into the
Speaker 1: Air Force. When Randall got out of military service in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty six, he got back into the radio business
Speaker 1: as a manager for a shop called Radiotel T E. L.
Speaker 1: And Randall convinced the shop's owner F. C. Hall and
Speaker 1: his friend Leo Fender that they should form a partnership
Speaker 1: that Radio Hotel should become a distributor for the guitars
Speaker 1: and amplifiers that Leo Finn There was building. Randall would
Speaker 1: become a salesman in charge of this account, and much
Speaker 1: of Fender's early success can be traced to Randall's management
Speaker 1: of sales and distributions. So Leo was making good products,
Speaker 1: but Randall was the one who was marketing and selling them,
Speaker 1: so together that partnership really helped cement Fender in the
Speaker 1: world of music UH. This would allow Randall to kind
Speaker 1: of scale things up gradually. He first started concentrating on
Speaker 1: local sales, and later that moved into regional sales, and
Speaker 1: eventually it moved into national sales, so he was able
Speaker 1: to help grow the business quite a bit. Fender would
Speaker 1: relocate his manufacturing facility to a larger factory in Fullerton,
Speaker 1: and he decided to officially make the design and manufacturing
Speaker 1: of instruments his primary focus. He would hand off supervision
Speaker 1: of the service shop the radio repair shop in ninety
Speaker 1: seven to a guy named Dale Hyatt, and then the
Speaker 1: shop at self would end up closing in nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: and the music company would become the only UH focus
Speaker 1: for Leo Fender. At that point, it still seems odd
Speaker 1: to me that he never learned to play guitar, but
Speaker 1: that fact did not stop him. He would create designs
Speaker 1: and then he tested them by asking musicians in the
Speaker 1: Fullerton area to try out his instruments and his amplifiers
Speaker 1: and to give him notes um to give him feedback. Man,
Speaker 1: it's hard to do this without puns. He asked them
Speaker 1: for their opinions about the equipment he made, and then
Speaker 1: he would go back and he would tweak those designs.
Speaker 1: He formed a lot of friendships with people in the
Speaker 1: music scene around Los Angeles and Anaheim, and there were
Speaker 1: quite a few at that time. And then uh Fender
Speaker 1: guitars became known for their really clean tones. The patented
Speaker 1: pickup really made a big difference. By the end of
Speaker 1: nineteen forty six or right around the beginning of nineteen
Speaker 1: Fender decided to rename his company again and he called
Speaker 1: it the Fender Electric instru Ments Company. Most of his
Speaker 1: clients in the nineteen forties were creating Western swing music.
Speaker 1: That was music that Leo Finder himself really liked. But
Speaker 1: Finder was starting to get the desire to create a
Speaker 1: Spanish style guitar. In addition to the lap steel guitars
Speaker 1: he was known for. Gibson had made some arch top
Speaker 1: electric jazz guitars, but Gibson had not yet produced a
Speaker 1: solid body electric guitar, and Finder thought he might be
Speaker 1: able to do that. Um So acoustic guitars, by the way,
Speaker 1: they typically have a hollow body that acts as a
Speaker 1: resonant chamber so that sound can resonate inside of it,
Speaker 1: and they have sound holes. The sound holes helped project
Speaker 1: sound from acoustic instruments and allow that that sound that's
Speaker 1: resonating out to create the tone that you want from
Speaker 1: that acoustic guitar. But electric instruments don't need a resonant chamber.
Speaker 1: They can have one, but they don't need one. The
Speaker 1: vibration of the strings creates the frequencies that are converted
Speaker 1: into electric signals, and that's all you need because then
Speaker 1: you can amplify those and send them on speakers, so
Speaker 1: you can create a solid body electric instrument with no
Speaker 1: hollow compartment at all. Les Paul is the guy we
Speaker 1: typically point to as the inventor of the solid body
Speaker 1: electric guitar. He experimented with some really wonky stuff early on,
Speaker 1: like a two foot section of rail from a discarded
Speaker 1: pile near railroad tracks. He paired that with a microphone
Speaker 1: from an old telephone and discovered that he could isolate
Speaker 1: the sound of hearing just the string vibrating if he
Speaker 1: plugged the string. The strings vibrations we're the only thing
Speaker 1: he could pick up. And that's exactly what he wanted.
Speaker 1: He wanted this isolation of sound. And he also found
Speaker 1: that the sustain on that note would go for a
Speaker 1: ridiculously long time, so you could hear a note played
Speaker 1: for a really long time if it was played on
Speaker 1: electric instrument. So in one he would go on to
Speaker 1: create an actual guitar from a four by four and
Speaker 1: made out of pine and he built in some homemade pickups.
Speaker 1: He called it the log. He would later fit that
Speaker 1: very odd looking guitar with some decorative wings designed to
Speaker 1: look like an epiphone guitar so it would look more
Speaker 1: like a regular guitar because as a log, people would
Speaker 1: just take a look at and they're like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a toy or something. It's not real. And
Speaker 1: it was only after he made it look like a
Speaker 1: quote unquote real guitar that people started to take notice.
Speaker 1: He had tried to take that idea to Gibson, but
Speaker 1: the company was not totally eager to jump on board
Speaker 1: at that time, so Fender decided it was time for
Speaker 1: him to give it a shot. And I'll tell you
Speaker 1: how that turned out in just a second, but first
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Fender's
Speaker 1: first solid body guitar was a Spanish style guitar he
Speaker 1: called the Esquire. The Esquire had a single pickup. It
Speaker 1: was located near the bridge of the guitar. The bridge,
Speaker 1: of course, is the anchor point at the base of
Speaker 1: the guitar's body, so it's the it's the part closest
Speaker 1: to where you would strum, so that's where you put
Speaker 1: the bridge. And Fender had made a prototype in the
Speaker 1: prototype had pine wood for the body. He actually took
Speaker 1: two slabs of pine wood and essentially glued them together.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the earliest Esquires aren't technically solid body guitars.
Speaker 1: They actually are slightly hollow. If you tap on one
Speaker 1: of those very very early Esquires, you're gonna hear that
Speaker 1: hollow sound. That was probably in order to help manage
Speaker 1: how heavy the guitars were, but he would later change
Speaker 1: the actual production models of the Esquire to be made
Speaker 1: out of swamp ash instead of pine, which was a
Speaker 1: much lighter wood, and that meant that he didn't have
Speaker 1: to have this hollow compartment at all, and they were
Speaker 1: true solid bodies. He also shaped the body with design
Speaker 1: that we'd call it cutaway. That's these curved designs you
Speaker 1: see on on guitars where they get these really kind
Speaker 1: of sleek, almost sort of pointed sections. The whole purpose
Speaker 1: for that actually is to create enough room so that
Speaker 1: a guitarist can have easier access to the upper frets.
Speaker 1: You know, when they're doing there their high notes, they
Speaker 1: want to be able to get their hands in there,
Speaker 1: and the cutaways remove some of that barrier. Unlike the
Speaker 1: elevated pickups Fender had used in those earlier lap steel guitars,
Speaker 1: the Esquire had its pickup under the strings, with an
Speaker 1: individual poll piece for each of the strings. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't that weird, I shouldn't say weird innovative design where
Speaker 1: the pickups were actually mounted to the face where the
Speaker 1: strings passed through. It was underneath the face of the guitar,
Speaker 1: so um, it wasn't in the way. The kind of
Speaker 1: pickup it was is a single coil pickup. That means
Speaker 1: all the poll pieces were surrounded by the same coil
Speaker 1: of copper wire wrapped around the pubbin and the neck.
Speaker 1: The Esquire was made from maple, so you had a
Speaker 1: swamp ash body and a maple neck, and the neck
Speaker 1: connected to the body of the guitar using an anchor
Speaker 1: plate held in place by four screws. And that type
Speaker 1: of construction is called a bolton. It's a bolt on
Speaker 1: neck guitar, and it's one of several ways that Fender
Speaker 1: guitars differ from Gibson guitars. Gibson's have necks that are
Speaker 1: glued into the body of their guitars, so they don't
Speaker 1: use the boltons. Fenders started to manufacture the Esquire in
Speaker 1: the spring of nineteen fifty. It appeared in Fender's catalog
Speaker 1: and you could purchase it for just a hundred thirty
Speaker 1: nine dollars and nine cents. However, we had just that
Speaker 1: for inflation, that would mean that it would cost about
Speaker 1: a thousand, four hundred eighty eight dollars today, not ridiculous
Speaker 1: for a Fender guitar. Actually fift dollars right in line
Speaker 1: for a Fender guitar. If you're to and that's if
Speaker 1: you're looking at a new one, not a Fender guitar,
Speaker 1: that's a vintage classic guitar. Those can be in the
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollars, depending upon the make and model.
Speaker 1: While the original Esquire only had one pickup, Thender began
Speaker 1: offering versions that had two pickups, and the second one
Speaker 1: was closer to the neck of the guitar, and so
Speaker 1: you had one pickup that was at the base right
Speaker 1: near the bridge, and one that was near the neck,
Speaker 1: so kind of spanning the space where you would strum.
Speaker 1: He also created a variation of it. They used a
Speaker 1: trust rod to stabilize the neck of the guitar. Now,
Speaker 1: trust rod is typically a steel rod that actually is
Speaker 1: nested inside the neck of a guitar, and the reason
Speaker 1: that you would include a trust rod is to provide
Speaker 1: that stability to counteract the tendency of a wooden neck
Speaker 1: of a guitar to slowly start curving inward over time
Speaker 1: because it's constantly under tension from guitar strings, so it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a brace in a way. The variation
Speaker 1: of the Esquire that had two pickups and a trust
Speaker 1: rod got a new name. It was called a new
Speaker 1: type of guitar, and that name originally was the Fender Broadcaster.
Speaker 1: But there was another company called Gretch, an American music
Speaker 1: company that made a drum kit that already had the
Speaker 1: name Broadcaster. So Gretch reaches out the Fender and says, hey, um,
Speaker 1: not cool man, we already have a Broadcaster products were got.
Speaker 1: We don't want to have confusion in the marketplace. This
Speaker 1: is a ninette. So Leo Fenders like, you know what,
Speaker 1: You're right, you got a point. So they dropped the
Speaker 1: name from the guitars, so they sold some that were
Speaker 1: under the brand name Broadcaster. Then for the next run
Speaker 1: of those guitars, they didn't have a new name yet,
Speaker 1: so some Fender fans referred to the guitars that were made.
Speaker 1: There were two single coil pickup guitars with the trust rod.
Speaker 1: They said, all right, well, since they weren't Broadcasters anymore,
Speaker 1: we're calling them no Casters because there's no name to them.
Speaker 1: And then after that, Leo came up with a new
Speaker 1: name for the design, called the Telecaster. So Broadcasters, no Casters,
Speaker 1: and telecasters are all essentially the same type of guitar.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, Leo kept on making little tweaks to
Speaker 1: the guitar design over time, so there are differences even
Speaker 1: between a Teleca, an early Telecaster, and a later Telecaster. Now,
Speaker 1: the Fender Telecaster became the first commercially successful solid body guitar.
Speaker 1: The Esquire would continue to be available, mostly originally because
Speaker 1: Fender was hoping he would use that to target a
Speaker 1: lower cost electric guitar musician market because it only had
Speaker 1: the one pickup, so it costs less than the Telecaster did.
Speaker 1: But then other cheaper electric guitars would later fill that
Speaker 1: niche There would be other single pickup electric guitars that
Speaker 1: would come in that would be much cheaper than the Esquire.
Speaker 1: But there were still many musicians who actually favored the
Speaker 1: Esquire itself because of the sounds it produced. They said, well,
Speaker 1: it's not because it's cheaper. It's uh, I know that
Speaker 1: the Telecasters out there, but the Esquire makes the sound
Speaker 1: I want. So it would continue in production for several
Speaker 1: years even though uh. From from a technical perspective, if
Speaker 1: you're looking at well, it has fewer features than future
Speaker 1: models of guitars, you would say, well, now it's obsolete,
Speaker 1: you should discontinue it. Much earlier but musical instruments are different.
Speaker 1: Some musicians say, no, this is exactly the sound I need.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about the sound of the
Speaker 1: Esquire and the sound of the telecaster and some of
Speaker 1: the ways that pick ups and switches and tone controls
Speaker 1: lead to that different sound. First, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: the pickup doesn't lead directly to the output jack. There
Speaker 1: were some more wiring between the pickup and the jack
Speaker 1: that allows a musician to get the tone that he
Speaker 1: or she wants. So with the Esquire, that included a
Speaker 1: three way switch, a volume knob, and a tone knob.
Speaker 1: So what do those actually do? Well, if you had
Speaker 1: a guitar with multiple pickups, the switch would normally let
Speaker 1: you switch between which pickups you were using to generate
Speaker 1: that outgoing signal. Right, So if you have a guitar
Speaker 1: that's got two pickups and you have a two position switch,
Speaker 1: it makes sense, alright, one position is for one pickup,
Speaker 1: the other positions for the other pickup. But this was
Speaker 1: a guitar that only had a single pickup. Why would
Speaker 1: you need a three position switch? And while it was
Speaker 1: considered to be more of a tone shaper, if you
Speaker 1: put the switch into position one, it would route the
Speaker 1: signal so that would only go to the volume control.
Speaker 1: The tone control knob wouldn't do anything if you had
Speaker 1: the esquare switch to position one, so this would control
Speaker 1: the amplitude of the signal sent out to the amplifier.
Speaker 1: Position two for the esquire would route the signal to
Speaker 1: both the tone and the volume controls, and that would
Speaker 1: create a sound that most people describe as being warmer
Speaker 1: than what you got. If you were had the switch
Speaker 1: in position one. Position three would again and the signal
Speaker 1: only to the volume control. It would bypass tone control,
Speaker 1: but would also go through a circuit with a special
Speaker 1: capacitor and a resistor network in it. That circuit was
Speaker 1: meant to suppress signals that represented frequencies and the trouble
Speaker 1: range of the guitar, creating what some would call a
Speaker 1: dark tone. So you wouldn't turn this knob and get
Speaker 1: start generating trouble. What you do is you turn the
Speaker 1: knob the other way, and what you're doing is you're
Speaker 1: you're suppressing trouble. You're taking some of those higher frequencies
Speaker 1: and you're suppressing them. And it's easy to do because
Speaker 1: you just suppress the parts of the electrical signal that
Speaker 1: represent those frequencies, So the switch would let the bass
Speaker 1: sounds play through with more volume, and Finder may have
Speaker 1: meant for this to let guitar players use their guitars
Speaker 1: kind of like a proto electric bass guitar. We'll talk
Speaker 1: more about bass guitars in our next episode. Tone knobs,
Speaker 1: by the way, are essentially potentialometers. Tone knobs are a
Speaker 1: bit more of a precise way to achieve what position
Speaker 1: three on the Esquire switch would do. You can do
Speaker 1: what's called rolling off the trouble on a guitar. So
Speaker 1: if you said a tone knob at ten, then your
Speaker 1: outgoing signal should represent all the frequencies your guitar strings
Speaker 1: are producing and the pickup is detecting. But sometimes that
Speaker 1: means you get a sound that has sort of a
Speaker 1: harsh or shrill quality to it. So you can dial
Speaker 1: that back, you can turn down that knob, and that
Speaker 1: increases resistance for those frequencies. Let's less of those frequencies
Speaker 1: through to the amplifier and thus to the speakers, and
Speaker 1: it can mellow out sounds, it can make them lower
Speaker 1: and darker and suppress that higher, shriller sound, and it's uh,
Speaker 1: kind of interesting. Like I've seen demonstrations of this, and
Speaker 1: you can when you know what's happening and you're really listening,
Speaker 1: you can you can definitely tell the difference. It's not
Speaker 1: like it's just you know, an illusion or it's wishful thinking.
Speaker 1: It really does change the tone of music. Amplifiers, by
Speaker 1: the way, also have controls like this, so you can
Speaker 1: actually really shape the way a guitar sounds by working
Speaker 1: not just with the controls on the guitar, but also
Speaker 1: the controls on the amplifier you're using. So some musicians
Speaker 1: prefer to keep the tone on their guitar set and
Speaker 1: never touch it again, and then they just deal with
Speaker 1: the tone controls on an amplifier and uh, they that's
Speaker 1: how they prefer to do it. In that way, they
Speaker 1: don't ever have to mess with their guitar controls. Others
Speaker 1: like to be able to control the way a guitar
Speaker 1: sounds in mid performance, you know, switch from one kind
Speaker 1: of sound to another while still using the same instrument.
Speaker 1: And it's easier to do that if you can just
Speaker 1: quickly adjust to control that's on the guitar itself. So
Speaker 1: it all depends on what you wanted to sound. Now
Speaker 1: I'm getting pretty far into this, so in our next episode,
Speaker 1: I'm going to start off by talking about how the
Speaker 1: telecaster change things up and having to pickups and how
Speaker 1: that changes the sound. And we'll also talk about how
Speaker 1: the Fender guitar helped usher in a new genre of music.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen fifties, Fender was making guitars mostly
Speaker 1: for Western swing bands and big bands. These were really
Speaker 1: large ensembles where electric guitars have become a necessity because
Speaker 1: if you had a guitar in your group, the only
Speaker 1: way you're going to hear it is if you had
Speaker 1: some form of amplification, because otherwise the instrument was just
Speaker 1: too soft to hear over the rest of the instruments,
Speaker 1: and putting a microphone in front of an acoustic guitar
Speaker 1: sometimes would create a lot of feedback and other distortion
Speaker 1: issues that just made the sound not very pleasing to
Speaker 1: the ear. So the electric guitar almost rose out of necessity.
Speaker 1: But this innovation was also saying the stage for a
Speaker 1: new type of band, one with fewer instruments that create
Speaker 1: a louder sound, and the telecaster would help pave the way.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you more about that in our next episode.
Speaker 1: For now, if you have any suggestions for future episodes
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