THE NEXT GREAT GUITAR
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Back in the day, Leo Fender thought a new guitar model would simply take the place of an earlier one. He figured the new improved Stratocaster, introduced in 1954, would replace the Telecaster, because he viewed the Tele and the Strat not as individual instruments but as a single piece of design work in continual progress, a sort of developmental whole.
Of course, we know it didn’t happen like that. Leo quickly realised, no doubt with encouragement from his salespeople, that a varied line of different models makes good commercial sense. It’s all about price-points and the tiered marketplace. But that didn’t stop him and his colleagues constantly looking for improvement. Their new ideas simply informed new guitars, and the first notable ones appeared in 1958 and ’62 as the Jazzmaster and the Jaguar. At the time, neither succeeded anything like as well as the primary pair.
Since then, Fender has basked in the glory of its original designs, modifying and tweaking and updating them through the decades. At the same time, though, it has been on something of a quest, searching for a design that might succeed as the next great Fender guitar. And often, that search has drawn on blends of the originals, mashing up shapes, controls, vibes, and pickups, transporting
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