The UK's Ultimate FENDER Experience
Looking for a new Fender guitar or bass?
There is no better place in the world than right here. Here at guitarguitar, we’ve been dedicated champions of the brand since our very beginning. To us, Fender’s quality, historical significance and constant levels of innovation put them at the very top of the guitar universe. Fender embodies everything that is great about musical expression, and we work to provide you with as much choice and variety as is possible.
From the most affordable Squier to the most ostentatious Fender Custom Shop model, we have your needs and desires covered. This is true of electric guitars, acoustic guitars, basses, amplifiers and effects: Fender excel at them all and we reflect this excellence within every guitarguitar store, not to mention this website that you are on right now!
Nobody knows more about Fender than our staff. Vintage Fender, contemporary Fender, and all points in between: we live and breathe the brand, and want to share that passion with you when you shop with us.
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Fender for Everyone at guitarguitar, the Home of Fender
The aim of today’s article is to highlight what’s available from us, in relatively general terms. I’ll give it to you straight, but briefly, so we don’t get too bogged down in the details. That said, we LOVE details, so where there are areas that are covered by a more in-depth blog, I’ll link you straight from here, so that you can choose to go deeper or just continue the tour, as it were!
Firstly though, I’ll begin our little tour today with an overview of the various Fender ranges that are currently out there and available.
Fender Ranges
Fender (and sister brand Squier) occupy and indeed define every price point that exists for guitars. From a few hundred quid to many thousands, you can pick up an instrument that bears the DNA fingerprint of the biggest guitar brand on the planet.
Fender are an American brand, but not all of their instruments are built there. Fender USA is the benchmark level of quality for the guitar world, and Fender’s other ranges pivot from this point. You get more affordable, and you get more expensive. Fender-branded guitars are made in California, Mexico, Japan, Indonesia and occasionally China. Country of manufacture depends on the series, so take a look below for the info. I’ll keep Squier separate for now, and instead focus on the Fender-branded instruments. Here’s a rundown on each Fender Series…
- Fender Standard Series: built in Indonesia, this range was only introduced a few months back, making these some of the newest Fender models on the market. Affordability mixes with quality to form an excellent first Fender.
- Player II: An upgraded take on the most affordable Mexican-made range. These punch particularly hard for the money and are massively popular as a result.
- Player II Modified: A variation on the Player II series which offers models with different hardware, pickups, finishes and features. A fun and legit alternative to the regular Player II models.
- Vintera II: Mexican-made Fenders with a specifically retro historic angle. You’ll find 50s Telecasters and 60s Jazz basses, for example. These feel different to more modern ranges, and have era-specific finishes, too.
- Artist Signature: this series straddles both Mexican and American production. This is where you’ll find all of the signature models from musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
- Made in Japan: Japanese-made Fenders earned themselves a high reputation in the 80s, and have since been released in relatively small numbers. These are somewhat separate to the rest of Fender’s output, and they are always highly anticipated.
- American Professional II: the flagship series for Fender. This is the ‘standard’, if you will. A large choice of models and finishes are available, and the quality is excellent.
- American Performer: the most affordable USA-made Fenders, designed with gig-friendly features like satin finishes and large frets. These are great value and only available in a few specific styles and finishes.
- American Vintage II: Vintage specific models (1950s Strats are different from 1960s Strats and so on), similar in concept to the Vintera models but made in the USA, and more directly authentic in terms of their vintage-accuracy. For example, this series is finished in nitrocellulose lacquer, which feels and looks different to the modern polyurethane lacquer used on most other series.
- American Ultra II: The most overtly contemporary in terms of features and specification. These are not vintage-themed at all - they are in fact the opposite - and offer lots of modern developments in guitar-building technology for players who want more ‘performance’ from their guitar.
Beyond the Ultra II series lies the Fender Custom Shop, which I’ll come back to a little bit later on! Now, here’s a quick rundown of the most well known Fender guitars and basses...
Stratocaster
The Fender Stratocaster is the most famous electric guitar in history. It has been played, recorded, toured and copied more than any other electric guitar ever. Since its introduction in 1954, the ‘Strat’ has been the world’s favourite guitar.
Why? Well, I’d venture that, as Leo Fender’s second electric guitar design, he basically started with an almost perfect design (the Telecaster, which we’ll see in a second) and gathered up all of the customer feedback from it, then poured it all into the follow-up design, the Stratocaster.
The basic formula has not changed in 70+ years: the contoured double cutaway body, trio of angle coil pickups and tremolo bridge, which lets you ‘whammy’ the pitch of notes as you play. The combination has worked for artists as disparate as Hank Marvin, Jimi Hendrix and Yngwie Malmsteen, and has proven itself to be both timeless and future-proof.
Today, the Stratocaster appears in every range that Fender offers, and comes in a bewildering array of variations. You can have humbucking pickups, locking tremolos, umpteen neck shapes and a rainbow of finishes.
The Stratocaster is one of those guitars that is pretty much essential to at least have an informed opinion on, such is its influence in the world of music.
Telecaster
The Telecaster - or ‘Tele’, as we tend to call it - was Fender’s first ever mass production electric guitar. Like the Stratocaster, the Tele of today has remained mostly unchanged from its 1951 origin, and like the Strat, it is available in a vast number of permutations these days.
The Telecaster has a sound that is twangy but powerful - more so than a Stratocaster, I think - and is often thought of as a ‘no-nonsense’ guitar, partly due to its fully utilitarian design. It is like your favourite wrench in your tool box: you love it and will always find a use for it!
The original design Telecaster had two single coil pickups, but subsequent models have added humbuckers and sometimes extra control knobs to the guitar’s design. The sound can change dramatically, but they are somehow still fundamentally Telecasters.
Offsets
In this industry, we use the collective term ‘offsets’ in reference to a number of Fender guitars. Mainly, it’s the Jazzmaster, Jaguar and Mustang models, and the Mustang and Jaguar bass. They earn the nickname ‘offset’ thanks to the non symmetrical body shapes they have. No guitar is truly symmetrical of course, but these have offset waists that result in giving them a particular look that is different to the likes of a Strat or Tele.
Offset guitars are more popular now than ever before, thanks to the enduring legacy of players like Kurt Cobain and Thurston Moore. Offset Fenders are seen as being more ‘alternative’ and therefore less mainstream than choices like the Stratocaster or Telecaster.
As Fender offsets have gained in popularity, so have they expanded throughout the company’s ranges. Nowadays, you can find offset designs in the majority (though not all) of series, from the Player II series upwards.
Fender Basses
Fender basses are hugely significant to every genre of popular music in the world. This is because it was Leo Fender who invented the instrument altogether! Prior to the debut of the Fender Precision bass in 1951, basses were all just acoustic double basses, such as you’d find in an orchestra. Leo changed the game by styling it like a guitar and giving it frets, basically.
That’s quite a reductive way to look at it, but the fact remains that the P-Bass (nicknaming Fender instruments is seemingly inevitable) and its later sibling the Jazz bass have been heard on more recordings BY FAR than any other bass instrument.
Today, it’s a similar story to how things are with the Strat and Tele: Fender make basses in lots of different ranges, and they are mostly variations on the Precision and Jazz models. Other bass models - such as the Jaguar and Mustang - also exist and are popular.
Step into any guitarguitar bass department and you’ll find retro Fender basses with huge necks, modern Fender basses with skinny necks, and many which provide a good half-way point in between, with perhaps active circuitry and eye-catching finishes.
Fender Amplifiers
Fender’s amps are nearly as ubiquitous as their guitars and basses! Certainly, they were the first brand on the block, and even the likes of Marshall owe their initial models’ success to being loosely based on Fender Bassman amps. It’s true!
Fender excel at making combo amps (as opposed to ‘stacks’ with separate heads and cabinets): from the 50s onwards we’ve seen Deluxes, tweeds, Twins and Princetons appearing again and again, as successive generations all want a slice of that magical Fender tone.
As with guitars and basses, Fender fully understand the historic appeal of their famous amp models. You can buy a vast number of reissues, both in authentic tube/valve form and as Tone Master versions, which accurately recreate the sound and feel of certain golden-era Fender amps but without the tubes inside nor the attendant weight attached.
Aside from these, Fender offers a Rumble range of bass amps and a Mustang series of digital modelling amps too. There’s also the Tone Master Pro, Fender’s entry into the world of top-end floor-based amp modelling and effects. All of the pro-level sounds you’ll reasonably ever need, in one handy floor unit with a large colour screen? It’s the future!
Fender Custom Shop
Fender Custom Shop is a special area of the California factory dedicated to hand-making extremely high quality instruments. Fender Custom Shop is a revered part of the Fender story, filled with painstakingly reproduced vintage replica guitars and basses. This is the place that created the ‘Relic’ guitars, and it’s here that many celebrity players have their personal instruments made.
Fender Custom Shop guitars have to be ordered years in advance since the demand greatly outstrips the supply. Instruments can be ‘Team Built’ (several Custom Shop staff have their hands on your guitar as it is created) or Master Built by a particular named creator. It’s all part of the CS experience and culture.
Thankfully, you needn’t wait years for a slice of the Fender Custom Shop dream! At guitarguitar, we spec up and order exciting CS creations as much as we can, so that we have as much available stock in our stores as possible. Why wait? Fender Custom Shop guitars are some of the best on earth, and to try one is to be hooked!
We also individually photograph and list our Fender CS guitars by their serial numbers, so the exact guitar you choose on our site is the one you receive. These small details make a big difference to your experience with us, and we want you to have exactly what you’ve chosen, not just something close!
Squier
At the other end of the price spectrum from the Custom Shop lies Squier, a very affordable sub brand of Fender. Back in the day, Squier (who got their name from a string manufacturer that Fender bought out decades and decades ago) were known as solid, dependable beginner guitars.
These days, you see musicians gigging and touring with Squier gear all the time. The brand has broadened its score to incorporate loads of cool vintage and contemporary appointments into their Indonesian and Chinese-made guitars, all without piling on the cost.
Squier offer their own ranges, so for more on this, please check out my dedicated Squier blog, but in short, you can have some very vintage-adjacent offsets for not a lot of money at all! The value for money offered with Squier is considerable, and we as a company are noticing that guitar players are far less fussy about the non-Fender logo on the headstock than they used to be!
Fender for Everyone at guitarguitar, the Home of Fender
There we are: those were the main, primary-coloured blocks that make up Fender’s (huge) offerings to us musicians. I genuinely don’t think there’s another brand out there with so much for every guitarist. Their longevity is impressive, but when you consider the quality and value that can be had - at all price points - then it’s really not much of a mystery as to why they’ve prospered since the mid-40s.
Fender are a force in the guitar world. We are right behind them, supporting all the way, and supporting you, too. When it’s time for your next Fender guitar, get yours from where the UK plays Fender. Get yours from guitarguitar.
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