On my wanderings as a crawler in the forum, I became aware that asking about Fender decals is a no-no.

I just finished reading "The Black Strat" by Phil Taylor and he mentions that David Gilmour's Black Strat had to be fitted on two occasions with third party necks, once from Jackson and once from Charvel. Both times it was requested that Fender decals were put on the headstock. How was this possible?

Simple, Gilmour is rich, he has the coin and thus can do whatever the hell he wants.

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Tomaz

Gear:
2007 electron blue MIM standard strat
Mustang I amp, small but deadly
fender CD-140 sce acoustic
squier affinity strat
frontman amp came with squier.
digitech multi-effects pedal

well fender does own both companies of the replacement necks right?

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63supro
"The good thing is in a club situation, most of the patrons are trashed and really can't tell the difference."

Maybe not because he is rich, but because he is David Gilmour!



Did Fender own both back in the seventies?

Edit to add: Just checked in Wikipedia: Fender bought Charvel/Jackson in 2002.

oh i thought he did that like a short time ago. oooops. well the other poster is right, i guess gilmour can do what he wants. i wonder if any of it is true though?
lots of false info out there on the web ya know.

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63supro
"The good thing is in a club situation, most of the patrons are trashed and really can't tell the difference."

Haha, that too. But really Gilmour is pretty much a fender guy, most of his gear if fender although the man does own a bunch of other stuff from different brands, but overall he pretty much uses fender as his main brand. This coupled with his fame makes him special to fender because if he plays fender fans are likely to try fenders to (gues how I chose fender?) and fender is about money so they make exceptions for people like him to advertise themselves thus Gilmour can put fender decals on almost whatever he likes.

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Tomaz

Gear:
2007 electron blue MIM standard strat
Mustang I amp, small but deadly
fender CD-140 sce acoustic
squier affinity strat
frontman amp came with squier.
digitech multi-effects pedal

Well for one thing, I think Fender trusted that DG would not put the guitar on Ebay and try to pass it off as a Real Fender neck

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“All music is folk music, I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.” Louis Armstrong

If you check out www.gilmourish.com there is alot of info on the Black Strat, and it does make mention of the necks and decals.

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that throbak pedal half way down is pure tone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkEsfD4o ... re=related

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63supro
"The good thing is in a club situation, most of the patrons are trashed and really can't tell the difference."

If Fender cant put your name on a Strat, you can put the Fender name on your Strat.

Yes it's true; Gilmour used 2 different Charvel/Jackson necks; the first one from '78 to '82, the other from '82 until he recovered it from the Hard Rock Cafe and Taylor started restoring the guitar. Here's the neck timeline as I recall it.

1. Original large headstock/maple board neck (it's a '68 or '69 so it has a 4-bolt neck) used from when the guitar was purchased in '70 through mid-'72.

2. Early 60s rosewood board neck - swapped it from a pre-CBS Strat in mid '72 and used that until mid '78.

3. Charvel/Jackson neck #1 - maple board neck with 21 frets used from mid '78 to early '82.

4. Charvel/Jackson neck #2 - birds-eye maple board neck with 22 frets; on the guitar from early '82 and was still on it when Gilmour donated it to the Hard Rock Cafe (it had a Kahler trem installed in '83). It was at the Hard Rock from '86 through '97.

5. 1998 Fender AV '57 neck - they started restoring the guitar in 1998 using an AV '57 neck, removing the Kahler, filling the Kahler route and reinstalling a Fender trem. Used from 1998 until 2005. However, the guitar was rarely played during this time frame.

6. 1984 Fender '57 Reissue neck - Gilmour found he preferred the shape of the early 80s '57 RIs he had been using; when he started playing it regularly again he took the neck from the vintage white '57 he used on the About Face tour and put it on this guitar. The CS guitars are copied from this neck.

A little Charvel/Jackson history - Grover Jackson was working for Wayne Charvel in '78; he was the person who really started manufacturing necks and bodies for Wayne (Charvel had purchased pin routers but never really used them - the famous EVH body was cut by Wayne at Dave Schecter's facility from a template the Tom Anderson modified from the standard Schecter template - Tom worked for Schecter back then).

Jackson bought Charvel out in '78 and changed the company name to "Charvel/Jackson" in 1982 after he started building the neck-through guitars under the Jackson name (the bolt-ons were still called "Charvel"). That company became "Jackson/Charvel" when Jackson took on investors to build the larger Ontario factory; that's when they started manufacturing the Charvels in Japan (circa 1986).

adding to this, charvel was on its way to being a big name. randy contacted charvel and wanted the now famous half flyingV that he nicknamed the pterodactyl.
grover didnt want to put the name charvel on the guitar because he just knew the design would flop, so he put his own name on the guitar, jackson. to his suprise it took off like a bat out of hell, or shall we say, Pterodactyl out of hell. and so it was, jackson was born, and at first it was only ment to be charvel's custom shop.

im about the biggest charvel/jackson guy you will ever meet. one day, if i can get them all together i'll post a pic of my collection of these two brands alone.

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63supro
"The good thing is in a club situation, most of the patrons are trashed and really can't tell the difference."

Wow, lots of info. Thanks Way Cool and John C!

Newwt, I am so checking out that site, thanks!

You know I forgot to address the Fender decal issue - there are a couple of possible explanations:

1. CBS/Fender wasn't using that style decal at the time of the 1st Charvel neck so they didn't care (and they didn't use that style neck either, just the big headstock/bullet truss rod/3-bolt necks) so they sent Taylor a few of the old-style decals.

2. The decals were replicas but again since CBS/Fender didn't use them they didn't care since Gilmour was a known Strat user and they weren't using that style decal on any current model.

I guess it gets a bit more problematic for the 1982 Charvel neck since Fender had announced the reissue Strats that year. However, those reissues didn't hit the stores until at least the fall of 1982 (or maybe even early 1983) so again maybe Fender didn't care because it was free early advertising for the soon-to-come reissues. The bottom line is Gilmour wasn't going to sell them commercially so they either gave them the decals or turned a blind eye to their use.

There are a few companies that make water slide decals. I bought a nice Strat decal for my home built Strat about 9 years ago.

Paris

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1975 Sunburst Stratocaster rosewood finger board
1979 Stratocaster with roseowood finder board
2001 Candy Green Clapton Stratocaster
2007 Andy Summers Inspired Telecaster
2007 '51 P-Bass
2012 Taylor 110
2015 Mystic Ice Blue Deluxe Stratocaster Plus