Fender Duosonic – Fender Mustang – Fender Musicmaster – Fender Stratocaster Junior – Fender Jaguar – Fender Bronco – Gibson Melody Maker – Gibson Byrdland
The Duosonic II was released by Fender in August of 1964, during the transitional period where the company was changing hands from Leo Fender to the CBS corporation. It was a companion to the new Mustang model that was released at the same time. The intention was the the Duosonic II would be an economy [...]
The Fender Jag-Stang, as the name implies, is a blending of the Fender Jaguar and Fender Mustang electric guitars. The idea for the guitar came from Kurt Cobain, lead singer and guitarist for Nirvana. Cobain presented his idea to Fender and they created two prototypes, one in Sonic Blue and the other in Fiesta Red, [...]
The Fender Jaguar was introduced in 1962 just as surf music was becoming popular. While surf essentially made the guitar popular it’s likely that the Fender design team was wanting to improve upon the Jazzmaster. To this end, the Jaguar had the same offset waist and dual circuit wiring that the Jazzmaster had. They did [...]
The Fender Swinger was a limited run short scale guitar made in 1969 when then CBS run corporate management came up with the idea of using their existing parts inventory to build a guitar. The idea was to combine the guitar bodies left over from the failed Fender Bass V project with excess parts from [...]
The period between the time Leo Fender started the Fender Electric Instrument Company around 1948 and the company’s sale to CBS in 1964 is known as the ‘pre-CBS’ period. The original Fender Duosonic was introduced during this time period, in the summer of 1956. Fender guitars made during this period are valued for their quality [...]
The Fender Musicmaster was a single pickup companion to the Fender Duosonic. It actually was shipped to stores a few months before the Duo-sonic back in 1956. Word has it that the reason for this was a shortage of pickups and, as a single pickup model, more units of the Musicmaster could be shipped in [...]
The Fender Mustang was introduced in 1964 as part of a redesign of Fender’s student guitar line. The basic idea was to add in things like a tremolo bridge and advanced pickup switching to the revamped Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic. The Mustang was perhaps the most successful of this line, staying in production from 1964 until [...]
The Fender DuoSonic guitar, sometimes spelled with a dash as in Duo-Sonic, was introduced in 1956 as a student guitar. Leo Fender realized that the price of the Telecaster and Stratocaster guitars were too expensive for many new guitarists. Also, the 25.5 inch scale neck was too large for small hands. Therefore the Duosonic’s neck was [...]