The Fender Telecaster, colloquially known as the Tele, is an electric guitar produced by Fender. Together with its sister model the Esquire, it was the world's first mass-produced, commercially successfulLes Paul had built a prototype solid-body electric guitar known as "The Log" in the 1940s, but could not market his invention. Gibson produced the Gibson Les Paul guitar in 1952 after bringing on Paul to help design a commercial model to compete with Fender. Likewise, Paul Bigsby and Merle Travis designed and built a solid-body electric in 1948, but this was a one-off guitar. solid-body electric guitar. Its simple yet effective design and revolutionary sound broke ground and set trends in electric guitar manufacturing and popular music. Many prominent rock musicians have been associated with the Telecaster for use in studio recording and live performances, most notably Albert Collins, Muddy Waters, James Burton, Steve Cropper, Steve Howe, and Jimmy Page.
It was introduced for national distribution as the Broadcaster in the autumn of 1950 as a two-pickup version of its sister model, the single-pickup Esquire. The pair were the first guitars of their kind manufactured on a substantial scale. A trademark conflict with a rival manufacturer, Gretsch, over its Broadkaster drum kit, led to the guitar being renamed in 1951. Initially, the Broadcaster name was simply cut off the labels placed on the guitars (leading to a limited run of nameless guitars known unofficially as Nocasters) and later in 1951, the final name of Telecaster was applied to the guitar to take advantage of the advent of television. The Telecaster quickly became a popular model, and has remained in continuous production since its first incarnation.
Like the three-pickup Stratocaster that followed it in 1954, the Telecaster is a versatile guitar and has been used in many genres, including country, reggae, rock, pop, folk, soul, blues, jazz, punk, metal, alternative, indie rock, and R&B. The base model has always been available, and other than a change to the pickup selector switch configuration, a thinning of the neck, and a few variations on the bridge design, it has remained mostly unchanged from the 1950s. Several variant models have been produced over the years including those with different pickup configurations and electronics, semi-hollow body designs, and even a twelve string model.
Overall design The archetypical Fender Telecaster is a solid-body electric guitar with a flat asymmetric single-cutaway body; the body is usually made from alder or swamp ash. The bolt-on neck is usually made from maple and is attached to the body with screws; it has a distinctive small headstock with six tuning pegs mounted inline along a single side; the fingerboard may be maple or another wood, e.g. rosewood, and has at least twenty-one frets. The Telecaster's body is front-routed for electronics; the bridge pickup is mounted in a metal plate attached to the guitar's bridge, other pickups are mounted in a plastic pickguard, and the controls are mounted in a metal plate on the lower bout of the guitar. Most Telecasters have two single-coil pickups, a pickup selector switch, a single volume control and a single tone control. Fixed bridges are almost universal, and the original design has three individually adjustable dual-string saddles whose height and tuning can be set independently. (Many newer models have six saddles.) The output jack is mounted on the edge of the lower bout of the guitar. Many different colors have been available. The Telecaster's scale length is .
There have been minor changes to the design over the years, and models with features that differ from the archetypical design. However, the essential character of the design has remained constant.
Origins
The Fender Telecaster was developed by Leo Fender in Fullerton, California, in 1949 and 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 made bolt-on neck, solid body guitars viable in the marketplace.
Fender had an electronics repair shop, named 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 bright and sustaining.
Fender's operations expanded to include a line of lap steel guitars, and several of the features of those instruments would be borrowed for a new electric solid-bodied guitar. In 1949, he began prototyping the new instrument. Though it was long understood that solid construction offered great advantages in electric instruments (and by the 1930s, Audiovox had offered a solid-body makeshift electric guitar), no commercial solid-body had ever caught on. Leo felt that it could be successfully done. It was designed in the spirit of the solid-body Hawaiian guitars manufactured by Rickenbacker—small, simple units made of Bakelite and aluminum with the parts bolted together—but with wooden construction. (Rickenbacker, then spelled "Rickenbacher", also offered a solid Bakelite-bodied electric Spanish guitar in 1935 that seemed to presage details of Fender's design.)
Most development guitars were discarded by Fender, but two prototypes survived destruction. An earlier 2-piece pine example was built in summer of 1949 with a headstock design borrowed from the company's lap steels, but otherwise possessing most of the features of what would become the Esquire (as the neck pickup had not been added at this stage). The second prototype from later that year featured an ash body and the final headstock design. The bridge pickup was based on a modified version of the company's Champion lap steel guitar's pickup.
The new model had not been made available for the 1949 NAMM Convention and Fender's sales manager, Don Randall, complained that other manufacturers had featured guitars with multiple pickups.
1950 The initial single-pickup production model appeared as the Fender Esquire in 1950. Ash and maple were used to construct the body and neck respectively and the guitar came in one color—blond. It was priced at $139.95 (). Fewer than fifty guitars were originally produced under that name, and most were replaced under warranty because of early manufacturing problems. In particular, the Esquire necks had no truss rod and many were replaced due to bent necks. Later in 1950, this single-pickup model was discontinued, and a two-pickup model was renamed the Broadcaster. From this point onward all Fender necks incorporated truss rods. The Esquire was reintroduced in 1951 as a single pickup variant, at a lower price.
1951 As a result of legal action from the Gretsch company over the guitar's name, the Broadcaster (Gretsch already had the "Broadkaster" name registered for a line of drums), factory workers simply snipped the "Broadcaster" name from its existing stock of decals, so guitars with these decals are identified simply as "Fender", without any model name.
The term Nocaster was later coined by collectors to denote these transitional guitars that appeared without a model name on the headstock. Since they were manufactured in this form for 8–9 months in 1951, original Nocasters are highly prized by collectors. There are no official production numbers, but experts estimate that fewer than 500 Nocasters were produced. Fender has since registered Nocaster as a trademark to denote its modern replicas of this famous rarity.
Around September 1951, Fender renamed the guitar to Telecaster and started placing these decals on the headstock. Debuting with a transparent butterscotch finish, single ply 'Blackguard', maple neck with walnut back stripe, the Telecaster would go on to become the most successfully mass-produced electric guitar in history.
In 1951, Fender released the Precision Bass as a similar looking stable-mate to the Telecaster. This body style was later released as the Fender Telecaster Bass in 1968, after the Precision Bass had been changed in 1957 to make it more closely resemble the Fender Stratocaster guitar. This double cut away style was the shape that influenced how the Fender Stratocaster was created. At the time Leo Fender began marketing the newly designed Stratocaster in 1954, he expected it to replace the Blackguard Telecaster, but the Telecaster remains in demand to the present day.
1952 By 1952, Leo Fender was clear of any patent or naming infringements, and the Fender company began producing the Telecaster guitar in larger numbers. These early models produced between 1950 and 1954 would become known as Blackguards.
In late 1952, Fender made several changes to the circuitry of the guitar. First, a true tone control knob was installed, that could be used to alter the tone from bass-heavy (in the 0 position) to treble-heavy (in the 10 position). The first switch position stayed the same as before, with the neck pickup in "dark circuit" treble-cut mode. In this position, the tone knob was disabled. The middle position turned off the dark circuit, and turned on the tone control knob for the neck pickup. The third position selected the bridge pick-up alone, again with an active tone control knob. Although this provided the player with a proper tone control, the change also made it impossible to blend the signal from both pickups. In late 1967 Fender again modified the circuit. They removed the "dark circuit" from the first position, and installed what has become the standard twin pickup switching system: neck pickup alone with tone control in the first position, both pickups together with the tone control in the middle position and in the third position the bridge pickup alone with the tone control.
Construction