Featured, News »

Fender has posted an interview with guitarist, John 5.
There can’t be many that are unfamiliar with John 5, if only from his work with Marilyn Manson.  He has, of course, worked with a shed-load of other artists and is lucky enough to have both a Fender and a Squier signature model (and both quite nice they are too).
You may not know, however, that he has a Fender Telecaster from every year they’ve been available except for ‘57, ‘58 and ‘60.  Lucky bastard.
His favourite is a 1950 Broadcaster.
It’s a good interview …

Featured, News »

Something for any Hank Marvin and/or Shadows fans out there.
Celebrating The Shadows is a concert of tribute acts to raise money for the Children In Need charity.  The concert is on 20th of November in Rushey Way in Reading and includes four Shadows tribute bands.
It also includes an auction for two electric guitars – a Fender 50’s Classic Stratocaster in Fiesta Red and a Burns Marquee in white.
Each has been signed by Hank and the Shadows (Bruce Welch and Brian Bennet) as well as ‘Sir’ Cliff Richard.
They’ll be auctioned off …

Headline, Workshop »

The 3-Saddle Intonation Problem
If you play a Telecaster with a 3-saddle bridge (like the one shown opposite), you may be aware that setting intonation on the instrument is a matter of compromise.  Because a single adjustment screw sets the intonation on two different strings at the same time, Telecaster intonation is really a matter of ‘balancing the differences’ and getting each string as close as possible without putting its partner string out by too much.
Move to a 6-saddle bridge
If this really bothers you, you can move to a 6-saddle bridge. …

Workshop »

You’re a millionaire playboy guitarist with a vintage Fender or you’re just someone with one of many current or past Fender originals and reissues.
Whatever the case, you’re finding that those big blues bends that you love doing are buzzing or, worse still, choking-out completely and dying. Your guitar plays fine and buzz-free the rest of the time but as soon as you go for a nice, soulful, bent note, it buzzes or chokes.
Annoying.
Possibly more annoying is when I tell you that there’s a good chance it’s just a limitation …

Workshop »

There are a number of reasons that a plucked guitar string might buzz.  We’ll probably go into some of those reasons in future articles but, as I happened to have one of the more uncommon reasons for a buzzing string in the workshop, I thought I’d share it with you.
What I had was a Tele with a few minor issues and a pronounced, ‘zingy’, buzz on the D-string.  This wasn’t fret-buzz – the string buzzed even when fingered at the last fret with no more neck in the picture (and …

The Month In Guitar »

A couple of notable anniversaries for October.
The Big Two of guitar makers both have something worth celebrating this month:

Although officially announced in April (and included on the cover of Fender’s April price list), full-scale production of the Fender Stratocaster really only began in October 1954.  Initial production – from April until October – was really quite slow, consisting mainly of marketing models.  These were used to demonstrate the radically new instrument to dealers and players (and at that summer’s NAMM).  Only after the dealers had gotten sufficiently used to …