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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 8:14 am
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Gravity Jim is right, Leo took some preexisting designs and made them into his own product. The frying pan was already there, the LOG was there. I need to check some additional facts, but I believe his design is also a copy of another electric.


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 8:35 am
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sulley107 wrote:
Gravity Jim is right, Leo took some preexisting designs and made them into his own product. The frying pan was already there, the LOG was there. I need to check some additional facts, but I believe his design is also a copy of another electric.


Sulley, I don't mean to imply, as your post does, that Leo Fender wasn't some kind of design genius, because he was. The guitars are awesome enough, but his amp circuits remain the best ever... they're not just pre-existing designs. The technology was there, but Leo's refinements are an achievement that can't be overestimated.
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I'm just saying that the development of rock music was as social phenom, and that it would have happened, albeit lightly differently, even if there was a never a Fender. If not Leo... someone.


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 9:17 am
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I agree with gravity Jim both that Rock & Roll would have happened and that we would have been the poorer for the absence of Leo Fender. Leo Fender is one of the rare people who are a Fountainhead (apologies to Ann Rand) and change reality. Pretty expensive hollow bodies like BB King's Gibson and some Rickenbackers were what was going on and they didn't have the durability, the low price, or the badass sound of Fender's solid body guitars. Guitars would have existed of course - they go back to the lute - and they had to be amplified to be heard over the bands and so Gibson and others would amplify them. However, without Fender's lightning stroke designs the idea of solid body guitars maybe never would have taken off. It was a novel idea and if Fender really had been a musician instead of an inventor and technical guy then maybe he never would have gone with it. Also, Fender was really close to the artists in the 1950s and he listened to them when they said the crazy solid test mule he was using sounded awesome, and then when they said they would like this or that on the Tele and that created the Strat. So much happened as a reaction to his innovations - the Les Paul, the SG, Marshall and on and on - the world would have been really different. Today I play a refined version of the Strat he invented in the 1950s, still with single coils for that remarkable and beautiful tone, just with a reverse-wound middle which cancels hum just like a humbucker. Even the humbucker was part of Gibson trying to compete with li'l ole Leo, and then Fender copped that with it's own humbuckers and stacked humbuckers and my personal favorite solution the reverse-wound middle.


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:12 am
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IMHO:
If Fender did not exist the others would probably be quite different too if they existed at all .

A lot of what is in the modern electric axes is based off the engineering found in Leo's creations. Even if he based his on previous designs, it was the Fenders that became popular and took over the world :D.

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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:21 am
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Would another inventor / company have 'risen' at about that time and invented the 'manufactured' guitar? This writer thinks, probably. Taking another leap of speculation, it would likely not have been Gibson, Guild, Rickenbacker or Gretsch.

Were the Bigsby solids bolt-on necks?

The conditions were right immediately after WW II for the "Times, they are a-changing," thinking. This writer guesses if Leo and Friends had not invented the manufactured guitar, someone would have been right in their place, not long after the Tele debuted "in our reality."


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:22 am
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peterp wrote:
A lot of what is in the modern electric axes is based off the engineering found in Leo's creations.


There is nothing that wouldn't exist without him. The market wanted it, he stepped up. But somebody else would have done it if Leo had been hit by a bus the day after he and Doc finished the Radio Shop Guitar.

The guitars would be shaped differently. But they would have eventually sounded the same. Think of the vast number of refinements that have been made, the incredible number of experiments that have been made in bridge design, pickup winding, scale length. Now think of all the people you've heard of who did these experiments, who contributed to the evolution of the electric guitar. Keep going until you have a list of 50 (I can come up with that many right off the top of my head). Now, realize this:

For every name on that list, there were another 20 guys you never heard of who were trying to achieve exactly the same effect. They just got beat to the market, or got eliminated by a more elegant design, or something.

That's why I say that it would have happened anyway. They wouldn't be called Telecasters or Deluxe Reverbs, but they'd exist in a form very close to what you know.


Last edited by Gravity Jim on Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:24 am
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I'm not attempting to discredit Leo by my post, nor take away from his creativity. After all, I believe he was the first to take the bass and modify it into an electric instrument (the P-bass) Before this occured the bass and guitar were quite seperate instruments. That alone indicate he was a genius. That being said, occasionally businesses and inventors borrow ideas for other businesses/inventors. What I meant to say in that post was that all of the tools were there for someone else to finish the job, it was just that Leo did it first. My apologies for sounding like a jerk.


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:26 am
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sulley107 wrote:
My apologies for sounding like a jerk.


I don't think you sounded like a jerk. I was just continuing the discussion, refining the concept. No apology required, dude... you're fine.


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:32 am
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Thanks. It is a good discussion. I think it would suck if Leo hadn't done what he did with the guitar.


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 7:26 pm
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If you take any random person and ask them to draw any guitar, 100 bucks says that thay will probably draw a strat. That is the kind of impact Leo Fender had and still has on all musicians. Also, I wonder what SRV would have played if there was no Fender?


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 8:20 pm
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Yes indeed, good discussion. 'Fender: The Inside Story' is a really good book about the workings inside the company, especially in the mid '50's through '60's, although I suspect that Forrest White had his own point of view about things there.

Someone once said (I think that it was Bill Carson, I could be wrong), that Leo Fender had 'ears like a oak log'; it's known that he couldn't tune a guitar or play anything beyond the radio or phonograph, and supposedly once said that his favorite guitarist was Roy Clark-of Hee-Haw fame (when it was pointed out to him that Clark played Gibsons, Leo supposedly said, 'no one's perfect').

I still think that what we know of as modern music would be very different without Leo Fender and the talent (Freddie Tavares in particular) he had on hand, in giving musicians what they wanted, and in actually listening to them. Look at his general contemporaries-Everett Hull of Ampeg was a strict Jazz lover, and would have kept Ampeg in that direction if he could've helped it. He got bought out instead. P.S.: The SVT and V4 amps came out AFTER he left.


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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 9:29 pm
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I know that I'd play Gretsches, because I own roughly equal numbers of Gretsches and Fenders as it is. Much like Gravity Jim mentioned, Leo was, at least to some extent, a product of his time and had he not come along we'd probably all meet on some other forum but the situation would have been different.

Probably Leo's greatest gift to music was the P-Bass because it made the bass into something that could be carried in a compact case, amplified easily and did not require the services of a repair tech nearly as often as a double bass (which can be a finicky beast).

The P-Bass would probably never have been what it was unless the Tele had been invented before and been successful as well. The Tele wasn't the first solid body, but it was the first to sell in quantity.

NONE of these would have been worth much had they not been properly amplified. Leo gave the world amps that were reasonably priced, good quality and they opened up a new sound. Plug a Strat or Tele through a Gibson 50 watt of the era and it will sound quite different. Those old Gibson amps are still prized by old-school jazzers but the bottom line is that Fender took amp voicing in new directions and this had a huge effect on music.

Without Leo, or the success of his company I'm certain that we'd have bolt-on necked guitars and there would probably be some interesting amps out there but I also suspect that the musical landscape would be much different than it currently is. I agree with twangee, we'd probably be closer to the music currently played on archtops and doghouse basses although I'm certain that the solid body would have come along sooner or later. Remember, Les Paul was beating that drum too and he was no small force to be reckoned with.


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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 6:08 am
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twangee wrote:
...Everett Hull of Ampeg was a strict Jazz lover, and would have kept Ampeg in that direction if he could've helped it. He got bought out instead. P.S.: The SVT and V4 amps came out AFTER he left.


That's an excellent example of my point.

Leo himself was a fan of banjo music and steel guitars. He hated the "in-between" settings on a Strat, wired it so you couldn't even affect the bridge pickup wiht the tone control: he wanted you to play his guitars to sound the way HE wanted them to sound.

But the world had other ideas. Just as Ampeg, originally born to help acoustic bass players be heard, eventually became "slightly softer than your average act of God," so would the solid body guitar, the P-Bass and the Marshall stack eventually have been created by somebody. Leo wasn't the only guy working on these things... he just got to the market fastest and best. And that wouldn't have happened either had it not been for his sales team pushing him!


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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 7:13 am
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I checked my information last night and it was the Bigsby Merle Travis solidbody guitar I was refering to. The headstock and some of the body had influences on the fender designs. It was not mass produced, which is another leg up the Leo had on its inventors.


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