How Fender Changed After the Acquisition

your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I love all things tech, and today we are continuing our story about Fender, and I spent a lot of time in the last episode kind of setting the foundation, leading all the way up to the first solid body electric guitar that Fender ever released, the Esquire, and then I hinted a little bit about the Telecaster, the follow up to the Esquire, the first electric guitar

that Fender made that had two electric pickups, not just one. We're gonna talk more about the Telecaster and of course the Stratocaster, and then I'm going to just be frank with you guys. I'm going to be speeding through kind of the years after Fender was purchased by a major media company up through to today. Uh, because it's kind of a sad story in many ways, and also it

just gets to be one of those things. It's like any tech company where I start feeling like all I'm doing is listing off all the different variations of the product they came out with, So like if I were doing the Apple story and then they came out with the Apple five like that gets tiring after a while.

So the same sort of thing holds true here, all right, So talked about the Esquire guitar, the single pick up electric guitar, and then the double pickup Esquire with a trust rod became the Fender Broadcaster, but nine one that had to change names and it became the Telecaster. So the telecasters two pickups change things quite a bit, which in the end means these guitars produce a different sound than Esquire guitars do. Now note I did not say

they produce a better sound. It's different. I think both guitars produce really good tones if they're paired with the right amplifier and they have a good musician playing them. But they are different. So why would you even include two pickups instead of just one? Why would you have one of those pickups near the bridge, you know, at the base of the guitar's face, and another one near the neck of the guitar where where the neck joins the face of the body of the guitar. How does

that change the nature of the sound. Well, think of how a guitar string is anchored right, So on one end of a guitar string, you have the nut, that is the end at the end of the neck, right where you go where a string goes over the nut and then it goes to the tuning pegs or the respective tuning peg. On the other side, you have the bridge on the body of the guitar, and those are

the two anchor points. Pickups react to string vibrations, so if the pickup is close to an anchor point for those strings, those strings are not moving with as much variation as they would closer to the middle of the string. You know, it's just if you the closer you are

to an anchor point, the less movement you're going to see. Overall, the anchor points become what we call nodes, and the points that have the greatest variation in movement, the points where the string moves the most, not faster, still moving at the same frequency, but it's it's covering more ground. You might say those are anti noodes. So again the frequency remains the same. Otherwise you would have a string

that's playing different notes along different links of it. Uh. We'll get a little bit more into that with harmonics in a second um. But harmonics are really complicated. In fact, let's let's do it now, because I've already introduced the concept.

A vibrating string has harmonics or overtones. So if you plug a string, the frequency you'll hear most prominently is what we call the fundamental frequency of that string, and as determined by factors like the strings eight or its mass if you prefer, the tension that the string is under, and how long the string is. But there are also

harmonics present. So for example, if you strum an open string, meaning you're not you don't have your fingers under any of the threats, You're just strumming an open tuned string. The second harmonic is an octave higher than whatever note the string is playing. So if you're playing a G note on an open G string, then the second harmonic is G, but it's the octave higher than what the

open string is. That harmonic represents the funnel mental frequency you would have heard if you held down the G string halfway down its length and then played it again, you would then have that higher octave G. So we perceive all of these harmonics as a single note when it's played on a string like this, the higher the harmonic, the lower the amplitude is amplitude being volume. So that's one of the reasons why we don't perceive this as

a bunch of different notes all played at once. We have a fundamental frequency that's played at twice the amplitude of the second harmonic. So those harmonics shape the tone or timbre of a note, but they don't uh determine the actual frequency. So positioning a pickup near the neck of a guitar emphasizes certain harmonics more than others because if you look at those harmonics, they all look like little sign waves, and the points where the sign waves

cross over the center part those are your nodes. That's where the string is not really moving at those locations. And then the peaks and valleys those are the anti noodes where the string is moving the most. So by positioning your pickup at a different point along the guitar, you are putting it underneath certain areas that might be nodes for one harmonic or anti noodes for another harmonic.

That means those harmonics will either be suppressed in the case of nodes, or enhanced or at least passed through in the case of anti noodes, and this is what

shapes those sounds. And it means that if you have two pickups on your guitar and there are you know, two very different locations where you're going to have a different sample of harmonics, Switching between those pickups is going to produce a very different sound, even if you're playing the exact same note, or maybe it's not very different, it is different, and again also depends upon the quality

of the amplifier you've plugged the guitar into. So uh, there are a lot of things that determine the qualities of this sound, and a lot of that has to do with build quality. Now, I would love to go into a full explanation of harmonics and physics, but frankly it's beyond me. I mean, if I'm being honest, I can grasp the basic concepts behind harmonics, but I've never really taken any classes in acoustics. I haven't really studied harmonics in uh in a deep way. I've very kind

of a cursory way. So it quickly gets away from me after that. And and there's some subtleties there that are in both in physics and in music theory which are very closely related, and I am not an expert in either. So rather than bolm my way through there and make terrible mistakes along the way and and really discourage all the musicians out there, I'm just going to admit this is the point where my my knowledge ends.

I get it up to there. But the important thing to remember for electric guitars is that the location of the pickup means the magnets will detect certain harmonics more than they would others, and that shapes the quality of the sound we hear. So we still hear them as single notes for each string, but the timbre of that note will change based upon which harmonics are coming through

and which ones are not because of the pickups location. Now, your standard telecaster has a three position switch, and if you listen to my last episode, you know that the Esquire the single pickup. It was a single coil pickup and it only had one of them, also had a three position switch. But the telecaster is different. The original telecaster switch had three positions that did different, very different things.

The first position would let you choose both the bridge pickup and the neck pickup together in parallel to send a signal out to the rest of the guitar being the volume knob and the tone knob, and then the output jack. The second and third position, uh, we're for the neck pickup alone. So there was no position that would let you play just the bridge pickup. For the original telecaster, if you had in position one, it was

the bridge pickup and the neck pickup. If you had in position two or three, it was just the neck pickup. Um And the difference between positions two and three for the neck pickup had to do with extra capacity. The neck pickup had a chrome cover on it, and this sapped some of the capacitants from the circuitry, and it meant that you lost some bass when you switched to

the regular position. To going to position three would add an extra capacitance, so you get a little more base in the sound that you would play, So the actual quality of the sound would change. But again there was no way to have just the bridge pickup in the

original nineteen fifty one Fender Telecaster. The nineteen fifty two model change this so that you had one bridge pickup selection and then two different neck pickup selections, but there was no setting that would let you use both pickups together. So the only big difference there was that instead of having position one the bridge and neck, position one was just the bridge. Otherwise it was pretty much the same

as the original telecaster. The different positions allow some harmons to come through to the signal or prevent those harmonics, depending upon the specific harmonics in which pickup you're going with, and that would change the quality of the sound. Uh. You get a very twangy sound typically with a telecaster, at least if you're playing it without the volume turned

all the way up. You know, the more volume you crank up on the guitar when you're sending it out to the amplifier, the more distortion you're going to get. So if you're if you're careful with that volume knob, you can get that nice twangy telecaster sound, the very

very signature sound for the telecaster. The telecaster also had knobs for volume and for tone, and the telecaster, by the way, sold for one nine dollars and fifty cents in nine, so that's like a thousand and eight dollars or so in today's money, so again not unheard of

for Fender electric guitars. By this time, Fender was spending his hours Leo Fender, the man was spending his hours tinkering and tweaking electronics, which I suspect is what made him the most happy about his job, since that's what he was doing all the way up till the day

he died. He handed off management, like day to day management of Fender to a guy named George Fullerton in Fullerton had been a machinist at Lockeyed Aircraft before he joined Fender, and like Leo Fender himself, Fullerton made significant contributions that made the telecaster possible. Fender continued to work on new designs. He actually worked on a design that led to the first electric bass guitar, called the Precision Base.

Before the introduction of the Precision Base in nineteen fifty one, bands were depending upon the upright double bass to provide

those notes. This is an enormous upright stringed musical instruments, huge, very cumbersome and bulky, and like the guitar, it was facing the problem of the fact that it did not produce as much volume as some of the other instruments in these big bands, so it was becoming hard to hear it, and it was on the danger of becoming obsolete because if you can't hear any notes that are being played, why lug this enormous thing around. Bender decided to try and do for the double bass what he

had done for the guitar. The precision bass was the result. It's in a guitar form factor. So you know you've seen electric bass guitars. They look like regular guitars, except they have four strings, not six strings. Your standard guitar has six strings. And the precision bass had some other elements to it that made it look more like a guitar and less like an upright bass. It had frets

on the neck of the guitar. The double bass doesn't have frets, So you still change the notes on a double bass by pressing down on a on a string at a certain point around the neck, but you didn't have frets to guide that or to really cut off the notes. This is why he called it a precision bass, because the freds made it easy to create precise notes, not approximations. That did change the quality of the bass notes a musician would produce, and not just because of

that precision. The electrical nature had a different sound to it, but that sound would become one of the most important components in modern music across tons of genres from country to rock to punk to funk music, and literally contributed to changes in music and rhythm, creating opportunities for musicians

to explore new sounds. The precision base of today has a split single coil pickup, so the wiring is split in two, so you have the top two strings for the base sharing one half of this single coil pickup and the bottom two strings sharing the other half, and they're offset. The two halves of the coil pickup are offset from each other, a coined offender. This creates quote, big beefy sound, more tonal versatility, and balanced output across

each string end quote. Bass strings are of a much heavier gauge than regular guitar strings, and I imagine they disrupt the magnetic feel to pick up more dramatically than the strings of their guitar cousins. So this split pickup is probably to help account for that, or to to

accommodate that. And music was changing around this time, so in the thirties and forties, popular music span genres like blues, jazz, gospel, big band music, folk music, African American influences in music were really growing at this time, and black musicians were synthesizing African musical traditions with musical instruments that could trace

their ancestry back to Europe. This music, which in its early days really shaped jazz and swing and blues, uh, we're later adopted for, or maybe we should say it was appropriated by white musicians. Uh, and they began to take those same sort of techniques and apply them to

music for their audiences. Um. So goes the long history of popular music in the United States, and the styles were evolving, with new techniques shaping the sound, giving rise to newer genres like rhythm and blues and then rock

and roll. Electric guitars and bass guitars would end up playing a pivotal role in those genres, and so while Fender Leo Fender was largely focused on accommodating musicians who worked in in the genre of Western swing as his target audience, he would find out his guitars would soon

become the foundation for entirely new movements and music. The telecaster and some esquires were a part of that, but the real game changer would be Fender's next electric guitar, the strato Caster, which I'll tell you more about in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor, not before I get to the strat which is what we call the stratocaster. I feel like a poser saying that. I guess I am a poser saying that, but it gets tiring saying it's stratecaster

and Telecaster over and over. It was in the early nineteen fifties when Fender was offering the Telecaster that things turned sour with the Radiotel company. That was the company that that Fender had been using to distribute his guitars. He felt Radiotel was focusing on the lap steel guitars at the expense of the Telecaster and the Esquire. You know, those were the Spanish style guitars, and Fender was feeling like the company wasn't taking him seriously with those models.

And there was even a point where Fender the company was forced to reimburse dealers who had bought Esquire and Telecaster guitars, only to discover that those guitars were full of termites. Had turned out that Radiotel had stored the solid body guitars in a garage and hadn't really taken good care of them before shipping them out, so Fender

was forced to write off about five hundred guitars. Because of that, Leo Fender made the decision to end the agreement with Radio Hotel, and in nineteen fifty three he created a new distribution company called Fender Sales. Donald Randall, the salesman who had come from Radio Hotel, would head up that distribution company, and other Radio Hotel salespeople and

executives actually came over as well. So I guess the guys that came over must not have been any of the ones that had anything to do with that bug situation. All right, Now, let's get to the stratocaster. In the world of modern music, I would say there are two guitars general guitar models that tend to rise to the top of the heap when you're talking about the musical instruments that defined rock and roll, and they are the

Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Strato Caster. The two guitars are very different, both in circuitry and the sounds they produce. And again I'm not going to tell you which one is better. I don't believe either one is better than the other. They're different and they make very different sounds, and I love the music that both of them can create. It all to pends upon the effect

you want. The differences in sound come down to a few factors, and they depend on more than just the electric pickups, although that is a big part of it. So one of those is that the Gibson less Paul has special pickups called humbuckers, and I talked about this in the Gibson episodes. They're called humbuckers because the design of those pickups is meant to eliminate the hum you get from electrical interference getting picked up by your electrical

pickup and your guitar. Because remember, electrical pickups essentially are working on the principles of electromagnetism, So if they are anywhere close to anything that's generating an electric field or a magnetic field, you can start getting this hum interference. And uh, you know, once you amplify that, that comes through and it goes through to the speakers and you

can hear it on the speakers. The Gibson guitars had these special humbucker coils, UH kind of had like these coils that were wired with opposite polarity, so that the collective interference the coils would pick up would actually cancel each other out. It's it's like they were out of phase with each other. And it's like a sound wave.

If you have a sound wave and then you produce a sound wave that has equal and opposite peaks and valleys, so that the peaks and valleys of one sound wave match up with the valleys and peaks of another sound wave, they cancel each other out. I explain more about that in the episodes about Gibson guitars, so you can go listen to that if you want to learn more about it. But speaking of humbuckers, I should mention Fender actually attempted a few times to create systems that could emulate the

humbucker sound without actually using humbucker pickups. The Baja Telecaster was such an instrument. Unlike the other telecasters, this model actually had a four positions switch. The other ones were all three position switches, and that fourth position would cause the neck and bridge pickups to work in series, not

in parallel. So if you remember the original telecaster, if you had it in the first position, both the neck and the bridge pickups would send signals, but they sent them in LLL, so both sets of signals would go to the output jack. The serial approach meant that the signal one of the pickups would pick up the signal and send that to the second pickup, which would then add it to its signal and then move that to

the output jack. That does change the nature of the music, and it made the two pickups act kind of like a humbucker does. That's the Baja telecaster. So back to the stratocaster. The strato caster has three single coil pickups. There's one that's near the bridge, the bridge pickup, there's one that's called the mid pickup, and then there's the neck pickup, so the mid pickup is in between the bridge and the neck. Uh. Then there's the scale length

of the strato caster versus the Gibson less Paul. Scale length is the length of the strings measured from the nut to the bridge. The Gibson less Paul has a shorter scale length. The string measures twenty four point seven five inches from nut to bridge. The stratocaster scale length is twenty five point five inches. It is three quarters of an inch longer than the less Paul that changes not just the tone of the strato caster, but also

the playability of it. So remember the strings frequency, the note that's going to produce when you pluck it depends upon the thickness of the string or it's gauge, the length of the string, and the amount of tension on the string. Once you string a guitar, it's pretty hard to change the thickness or length of that string, but you can change the tension either through the tuning pegs or if you have a vibrato bar like the strato

caster does. More on that in a second. You can do it that way, or you can change it just

by you know, again, tuning very slowly. So if you want to tune a less paul in the strato caster to the same tuning, you want both guitars to have the exact same tuning, you actually have to put more tension on the strato caster strings because it has a larger scale length, and the longer scale also means the space between frets on a stratocaster is larger, So that might mean that if you have small hands, that playing a stratocaster is more of a challenge to you than

it would be with a less Paul because the frets are further apart from each other than they are in a less Paul. The longer strings on a strap make it a bit easier to bend the strings, so you can start to shape notes that way. And the longer scale is also one of the contributing factors to making the sound of a stratocaster sound like a mel It chimes almost. It's very clear when you have the settings um properly set and a and a good amplifier and it it can be a little more jangly and clean

than a less Paul. You can pick out those notes much more easily. But a less Paul creates a pretty iconic rock sound frequently used in harder rock, metal, that kind of stuff. The strato caster became incredibly popular guitar for all sorts of other types of rock, especially things like of music. I always think of the stratocaster in

relation to surf guitar. That's that jangly music you'll hear on those instrumental surf rock albums, stuff like Dick Dale and the Dell Tones, or the Woggles or the Hate Bombs or manner Astroman or Low Straight Jackets. They all are using guitars that either are stratocasters, they are copies of stratocasters, or they are built on similar principles to stratocasters, and more frequently than not, they are actual Fender stratocasters. The stratocaster today has a five position switch to choose

which pickups you want to use. Remember there are three pickups, but originally it did not have a five position switch. Originally it only had a three position switch because Leo Fender really liked the idea of isolating each pickup so that you were only going to hear the bridge, or you're only going to hear the mid, or you're only gonna hear the neck. That that was kind of his aesthetic, and so each position corresponded with one of the three pickups.

But musicians found that if you position the switch between two real positions, like between the bridge and mid positions, you could actually get a new sound because it was combining the input from both pickups simultaneously, and so they were doing things like shoving stuff in their their toggle switches to hold the position there and get this sound. Fender would finally respond to this in nineteen seven by creating a five position switch so that people wouldn't be jamming,

you know, match books into their switches anymore. So the rear most position is for the bridge pickup. You go up one. Now you're at the bridge and mid together. You go up another. It's the mid pick up all by itself. Go up another, it's mid and neck pickups. Then you go up to the last one. It's just the neck pickups. So each setting shapes the sound in a different way. Then again it's because of those harmonics.

Now you can you start to get a very clear and crisp sound towards the bridge and a more mellow some would call it kind of a either warmer or muffled sound towards the neck. And again that also depends upon you having other really good equipment, you know, a good amplifier when you're plugging in. Otherwise the differences can be too subtle to tell if you don't have a really good amplifier. The strat also has two tone controls

in addition to a volume control. Cranking the volume up creates a really high gain sound, and you know, you can get this really crunchy rock sound of a strato caster if you turn that volume knob on the guitar very all the way up, but if you're saying it at a lower volume, you create these very clean tones. And it's so interesting that this one dial, just a volume dial, the the amplitude of the signal you're sending out to the amplifier can have such a dramatic effect

on the sound coming out of that guitar. I watched videos of a guy going through this and it was really amazing. You would just tweak the volume knob a little bit and generate very different sounds. The two tone knobs are meant for various pickup positions. Uh. One tone knob is really just for the neck pickup alone. So if you're using the neck, you would just use tone

knob number one. If you're using the neck and the mid together, then you need both tone knobs to roll off the trouble, and for the mid down to the bridge pickup, you would just used the second tone knob. Um, So the second tone knob commands the the trouble for the bridge in the mid, and the first tone knob

for just the neck pickups. The Strato caster debuted in nineteen fifty four, and the body has curves called cutaways near the neck which like the Esquire and the telecaster, allows musicians to get access to those upper frets so they can do their squiggly li dus. The strato caster also had a synchronized tremolow bar or the whammy bar. It's more appropriately called a bra. I talked about that

in the last episode. That would let a player dynamically change the amount of tension on a string, which allows the player to affect the tone of the note, the pitch of the note, to increase or decrease the pitch to bend the note using this thing. Fender thought that the Leo Fender he thought the stratocaster was going to replace the telecaster, so he's like, well, this is an upgrade. The telecaster is gonna go obsolete, and that Fender as

a company would just phase out the telecaster. But the stratocaster one did not catch on immediately, and some musicians just legitimately loved the sound of the telecaster, and it's not necessarily easy to replicate the telecaster sound using a stratocaster, and some people just developed this love of that telecaster sound. So there was still a demand for the telecaster even

after the stratocaster came out. One guy who really did help boost the profile of the stratocaster was a rock star and unlikely one named Buddy Holly, or that's what we all call him. Some of you may not know who that was, and I don't judge you for it. Buddy Holly was an early rock and roll musician who brought he got a stratocaster way back in nineteen fifty

five and Lubbock, Texas. He borrowed some money from his brother in order to buy it, and like the telecaster, the strat was mostly known as a musical instrument that was used by people who were making country and Western music.

But Buddy Holly grew up in Texas and that was the kind of music that was all around him, and he drew a lot of inspiration from that style of music when he started to put together his own band and create a new sound, which I'll talk about a little bit more in just a second, but first let's

take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Buddy Holly and the Crickets created a sound that put a nearly equal emphasis on lead guitar and rhythm, and by ninety eight, his music, his band's music was at the top of the charts, and his guitar of choice was influencing many others to take a close look at the strato caster, particularly bands in England like the Beatles, who named their band partly because you had Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Holly would die in a tragic plane crash around one

am on February third, nineteen fifty nine. That plane also had Ritchie Valen's and J. P. Richardson, who is better known as the Big Bopper in it. Together those three musicians had made some of the most popular music in the early rock and roll era, and that day became known as the Day the Music Died. It's also the subject of the song American Pie, the song, not the

movie series. Putting tragedy aside. Buddy Holly really helped Fender sell a lot of strato casters, and the company created a new line of guitars and amplifiers that they were aiming for the budget conscious musician under a new brand called White that was a tribute to Forrest White. He was a Fender's production manager. So now you have a

much larger customer base coming to buy guitars. All of a sudden, the rock and roll emergence had inspired tons of kids to get into making music, and the strato caster became one of the guitars of choice for a lot of those musicians. Fender the company tried to diversify a bit. They added some other instruments to their line, including electric mandolins. They had an electric violin for a

short while. They also started making acoustic guitars, but most of these lines, including the White brand, were ultimately discontinued. They just didn't take off quite as much and they were pulling a lot of focus from the electric guitars center. Now, they kept on making more models of telecasters and strato casters. You know, you typically call them by whatever year they came out, and some of them would tweak things so

they wouldn't be exactly the same. So that's why you have musicians who talk about the the pros and cons of the various model years for telecasters, strato casters, that kind of stuff. Leo Fender also created a jazz guitar that got a lot of love in certain circles, but never reached the levels of popularity of the stratocaster, and in nineteen sixty four, Leo Fender's health took a turn for the worst and he thought about retiring, so he offered to sell the company to Don Randall for the

princely sum of one point five million dollars. Randall, however, didn't really have the scratch together to buy a company at that price, so he told Fender, hang on, let me see if I can find a buyer, and he found one. That buyer was the Columbia Broadcasting System better known as CBS. YEP that CBS. CBS had a subsidiary company called Columbia Records Distribution Corporation, and that was the subsidiary that Negotia. You had to acquire the Fender Electric

Instruments Company for thirteen million dollars. They announced that deal on January five, nineteen sixty five. The new company was originally called Fender CBS, but in nineteen sixty six the company changed its name to CBS Musical Instruments because it was going on a bit of a buying spree with other musical instrument companies. So uh Fender as a brand and a division still existed, but it was no longer the name of the company. CBS started making big changes

pretty early on with Fender. For one, thing. There were some issues over at Fender Electric Instruments. The company had been growing in a very haphazard kind of way since its founding back in nineteen forty six. By the time CBS acquired Fender, there were offices and factories and distribution centers in twenty nine different buildings scattered across Fullerton, California. That's not a very efficient way to run a company. So SEE has decided they wanted to consolidate that into

a centralized facility. They made plans to build a huge facility hundred twenty thousand square feet in size, and it would cost more than a million dollars. They finished it in nineteen sixties six. CBS talted it as being a high tech, dust free manufacturing facility that could produce guitars

at a much faster rate and meet demand. And you could argue that if you could do this, and if you can maintain quality, then you could bring the price down on guitars, right because if it costs less to make them, you can still get your profit and sell them at a lower cost, and that will also attract more customers, so you actually end up making more money in the long run. That's if you can keep the

quality up. CBS also sent along analysts to Fender to study how efficient Fender employees were when they were making instruments, and that started rubbing people the wrong way because a lot of people consider themselves, you know, crafts and artists there. They take great pride in what they do and they don't want to compromise on quality for the sake of

speed or efficiency. Forrest White, who I mentioned just a moment ago, would write in a book that the experts from CBS seemed to think that they had all the answers and they were kind of disregarding the opinions and UH and expertise of people who worked for Fender. Now, I should say that White comes across as very opinionated in the various things I've written, I've read that he has written, and UH, I don't know how unbiased his view was, but he certainly felt very strongly about this.

White himself would leave the company a couple of years after CBS took over UH, and it was over a disagreement with an amplifier that CBS wanted to produce. White felt that that amplifier failed to live up to the name and a reputation of Fender, and rather than preside over the production of a product that he felt was substandard,

he left the company. Fender continued to exist as a brand, obviously, and continue to manufacture guitars and various models, and would occasionally update those models over time with some new features. You know, I mentioned that five switch for the for the strato caster, or sometimes they would strip new features out if musicians gave feedback that said, this thing you've included on this guitar is terrible and it's pointless and you should take it out. Sometimes that did happen, but

the updates and the new models were rather infrequent. You didn't see as much innovation coming out of the company once CBS took over, and some Fender employees worried that the quality overall was taking a hit. And in fact, you'll see a lot of forums out there about guitars written by musicians who say, yeah, Fender instruments in general, not just like a strato caster or a telecaster or whatever, but in general from that era are of a low or quality than the ones that preceded the CPS takeover.

Don Randall would resign in nineteen sixty nine allegedly because he felt the politics of the company were too much to bear. It wasn't a question of the quality of the products for Randall, but it was more about how people would backstab each other and try to climb the

corporate ladder, and he got tired of that. Leo Fender was retained as a consultant for many years, but he would leave Fender as well in nineteen seventy uh Forrest White said that CBS executives rarely gave Leo Fender very much attention or respect, and so Fender would go on to work with a company that eventually became known as

music Man Incorporated. UM. He started sort of consulting with him in nineteen seventy four and building instruments and components for them back at that time, and music Man was founded by Forrest White and another former Fender employee named Tom Walker, who was the district sales manager over Fender before he left to to found this company. Leo Fender would also form a new partnership with George Fullerton, the man he had given management accountability to way back in

the day. So this is in nineteen eighty and Leo Fender and George Fullerton create g N l Incorporated. That stood for George and Leo. Fullerton would cash out in nine six, but Leo stuck with it until he passed away, in working until the day he died, and including the day he died. But now let's get back to Fender, the company and brand. So he listened to the Gibson episodes. You know, there was a period during which Gibson employees

were going through a very similar experience. There was this large company that comes in, acquires them and tries to create a more mass manufacturing approach to what they were doing, and that there as a result, some of the employees developed a lot of resentment, and there's a general feeling that the guitars that were produced in that era were of a general just a lower quality than the earlier ones.

The explosive popularity of rock and roll in the sixties had led to an unprecedented demand for electric guitars, so companies like Gibson and Fender were making these instruments that were in really high demand. So in some ways this corporate move might have been necessary just to keep up pace with the demand for the products. However, that decrease in quality kind of balances things out, so those compromises made along the way made a lot of people unhappy,

both in the company and customers of the company. In the nineteen eighties, CBS was facing stiff competition from a new rival, not Gibson, but Japanese companies that were producing electric guitars for a lower cost than Fender or Gibson, and at first cbs solution was to shift manufacturing overseas to Korea, but the guitars that were being produced out of those facilities did not measure up to the quality Fender had established in the market, so they ultimately said, well,

this isn't going to work. So then they changed the executive leadership at Fender. They got some new leaders for that division that would include William Schultz who became the president of the division and Dan Smith who became the

director for marketing of Fender. John McLaren became the new head of CBS Musical Instruments that would be the subsidiary company that would oversee Fender, and that executive team found that Fender's reputation was really starting to suffer, that musicians were seeking out older models of telecasters and stratocasters instead of new models because they said the build quality was just better and the sound was better in those classic models, and so on close examination it appeared that they were

onto something. Dan Smith would later say, quote, we were brought in to kind of turn the reputation of Fender around and to get it so it was making money again. It was starting to lose money, and at that point in time, everybody hated Fender. We thought we knew how bad it was. We took for granted that they could make strato casters and telecasters the same way they used to make them, But we were wrong. So many things

had changed in the plant end quote. So he's not necessarily saying that they employees were at fault, but that the changes that had been made over the previous decades were such that it was now impossible to make the guitars the way they had been made, especially under the

policies that CBS had created. In nine two, Williams. Schultz scaled back on Fender guitar production, focusing primarily on creating reissues of limited editions of class guitars from before the time when CBS bought the company, and Schultz also arranged for a new division within Fender called Fender Japan, which was a partnership with Kondo Shokai and Yomana Music as distributors, and a Japanese company called Fuji Genghaki got the license

to produce Fender branded guitars, with the intent that they would only be sold in Japan, but the brand called Squire, named after the old Esquare guitar actually made in Japan, eventually became an export to the United States in nineteen eight three, so you can buy Square guitars in the

States too. In March nineteen five, CBS was ready to offload Fender because CBS was trying to push off a possible takeover, and so they were looking to wait for ways to divest of certain things and really focus on protecting the company. So they chose to sell the Fender division to William Schultz and a group of investors for

about twelve point five million dollars. That's actually half a million dollars less than what CBS bought the company for decades earlier, so when you factor in inflation, they really did take a loss from the purchase to the sale of that company. This new company became Fender Musical Instruments, but the manufacturing facility that CBS had bought. The hundred twenty thousand square foot facility was not part of this deal.

The new company started its life deep in debt, with no real US base for manufacturing the only Fender guitars being made. Right after the deal, we're in Japan, Schultz would cut nearly nine percent of the staff at Fender, going from eight hundred employees to ninety. Schultz then made the Fender Custom Shop in Corona, California, and he began to lure big name musicians in with free or heavily discounted Fender instruments if they would in return up here

in ads for Fender. And it took some time, but the company slowly began to build back up again, and they introduced the American standards model for strats and Telly's in and then Schultz would move the company headquarters away from its long time home of Fullerton, California, to Scottsdale, Arizona, and by the the a little bit later, the company was opening up a new manufacturing facility in Mexico and

Korea and China. By ninety six, the Corona plant grown out of this little custom shop had grown up to six hundred employees. So Fender was kind of on the rebound here. Schultz would oversee the company until two thousand five, when he would retire. He had made a lot of compromises, but he also managed to return Fender's reputation to where it had been before the CBS acquisition. William Mandelo, who was part of the same group that made that purchase

from CBS, would become the new CEO Offender. Since then, Fender has been able to get back on its feet, even while it's seeing its competitor Gibson have to file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. But I covered that story in the previous episode, so you can go listen to that if you want to find out why that happened. Fender also has guitar models that I didn't really get into in these episodes, but I feel like I should acknowledge the fact they do exist. It's not like it's just

the strato Caster and the Telecaster and the Esquire. There's like the jazz Master. There's the Jaguar, which also was another important surf rock guitar, and they didn't quite approach the level of reference given to the strato Caster. But they're still important and you can still buy Fender guitars to this day. One of these days I am going to have to get one. I think I really like the Fender sound. I love the Gibson sound too. I love them both. But there's something about the Fender that

strato Caster that has always really appealed to me. And that concludes these episodes. I know that I really flew through the last two decades of Fender, but that's because, again, the story would have essentially been a new model of strato Caster comes out and nobody likes it, because people felt that the the models that were produced under the CBS ownership were substandard, and it took quite some time for that reputation to be repaired. But I would say

that these days it has largely been repaired. I would also say that musicians still to this day try to seek out those vintage models when they can. You have a lot of collectors out there, and you have a lot of musicians who just swear by those early early Telecaster and strato Caster models, and that's all they want. They don't want to replica, you know, they want to reissue. They don't want a later model, they want the original. But you got to shell out huge amounts of money

for those. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a technology, a person in tech, send me a message. The email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech stuff hs W. Hey, I notice that that shirt you're wearing. It's looking kind of ragged. You know what you should do? You should go to t public dot com slash tech stuff. Get

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