Fender Telecaster
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| Manufacturer | Fender |
|---|---|
| Period | 1950–present |
| Body type | Solid |
| Neck joint | Bolt-on |
| Scale | 25.5 in (650 mm) |
| Body |
Alder Ash Poplar Pine Basswood |
| Neck | Maple |
| Fretboard |
Maple Rosewood |
| Bridge | Proprietary "Ashtray" or modern style with string through or top load strings. |
| Pickup(s) | Traditionally two single-coils Combinations with 1 to 3 pickups, including humbuckers have been produced |
| 2 or 3-color or maple sunbursts Shades of blonde (translucent earth tones) sonic blue, red, surf green, yellow, wine red. |
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The Fender Telecaster, colloquially known as the Tele /ˈtɛli/, is the world's first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar. Its simple yet effective design and revolutionary sound broke ground and set trends in electric guitar manufacturing and popular music. Introduced for national distribution as the Broadcaster in the autumn of 1950, it was the first guitar of its kind manufactured on a substantial scale and has been in continuous production in one form or another since its first incarnation.
The Fender Telecaster was developed by Leo Fender in Fullerton, California in 1950. In the period roughly between 1932 and 1949, several craftsmen and companies experimented with solid-body electric guitars, but none had made a significant impact on the market. Leo Fender's Telecaster was the design that made bolt-on neck, solid body guitars viable in the marketplace.
Fender had an electronics repair shop called Fender's Radio Service where he first repaired, then designed, amplifiers and electromagnetic pickups for musicians—chiefly players of electric semi-acoustic guitars, electric Hawaiian (lap steel) guitars, and mandolins. Players had been 'wiring up' their instruments in search of greater volume and projection since the late 1920s, and electric semi-acoustics (such as the Gibson ES-150) had long been widely available. Tone had never, until then, been the primary reason for a guitarist to go electric, but in 1943, when Fender and his partner, Clayton Orr "Doc" Kauffman, built a crude wooden guitar as a pickup test rig, local country players started asking to borrow it for gigs. It sounded bright and sustaining. Fender was intrigued, and in 1949, when it was long understood that solid construction offered great advantages in electric instruments, but before any commercial solidbody Spanish guitars had caught on (the then-small Audiovox company apparently offered a modern, solidbody electric guitar as early as the mid-1930s), he built a better prototype.
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Wikipedia