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The Fender Telecaster: 60 Years of Six-String Perfection

On the anniversary of one of the most influential creations in the history of music, Guitar Planet takes a look at how Fender’s first solid-body electric changed guitars forever.

Friday, 20. May 2011 - by Evan Dexter

This year hosts a noteworthy event in guitar history; one that celebrates the creation of something massively influential to music around the world – especially guitarists. And I’m not talking about the Justin Bieber movie.

No, 2011 is remarkable to six-stringers for a much better reason. It marks the 60^th anniversary since the birth of one of the most widely played and most revered instruments in music: the Fender Telecaster.

For the better part of a century the Telecaster – or Tele, as it’s colloquially called – has revolutionized electric guitar design and reshaped the sound of music. Any enthusiast would be pressed to think of a guitarist that hasn’t bent the strings on a Telecaster throughout their career.

Rivaled only by its younger and more sophisticated cousin, the Stratocaster, the Tele has taken stage in the hands of legends like Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Tom Morello; and that’s really naming just a few.

This month, Guitar Planet pays tribute to a truly deserving instrument that set the bar for solid-body guitars and changed music forever.

The Tele Vision

When Leo Fender set out to design a solid-body electric guitar in 1949, he was trudging largely into new territory. Other companies and designers had experimented with solid-body builds, but none too successful. Fender’s Telecaster not only established the solid-body electric in the guitar market, but did so with a model that still today stands up to the best of its rivals.

The first prototype borrowed and mimicked the designs of rivals companies Audiovox and Rickenbacker, who had both released versions of solid-body Spanish electric guitars more than a decade earlier. The design entered the production line in 1950 by the alias Fender “Esquire”. It was a single-pickup guitar that was discontinued later in the year after Fender was forced to replace models with bent necks due to a lack of a truss rod.

Fender followed up in the same year with a two-pickup model coined as the “Broadcaster”, but was quickly forced to drop the name when Gretsch claimed it violated their already established Broadkaster drum line. By 1951, the guitar was produced officially as the Telecaster and the Esquire was reintroduced as a single-pickup low market Tele.

Casting Sounds

What the solid-body Telecaster did in sound was provide versatility that had not been available in previous guitars. Before 1951, electric guitars were almost always hollow-bodied, which made them prone to feedback, particularly when played at louder volumes. This made it much more difficult for guitarists to maintain truer tone without sacrificing volume.

The Telecaster’s solid-body allowed the strings to deliver a much more pure tone, even when played loudly.

Furthermore, the two-pickup system allowed the guitar to produce different types of tones suited for various genres of music. The neck pickup produced a softer and warmer tone, appropriate for blues and offering an alternative to the similar sounding hollow-bodies that held a monopoly on blues guitarists.

To contrast, the bridge pickup had more windings which allowed for significantly higher output. It could be used to create sharper and richer tone more suited to rock, jazz, and particularly country as it could mimic the tone of a steel guitar.

Teleing the World

All of these features enhanced the flexibility of the Tele and fueled both its impact and popularity. For the first time, one guitar could be used across nearly all genres of music.

Since its launch 60 years ago a wide range of models have been released emphasizing the Telecaster’s various strengths via modifications to the body of the guitar and swapping out stock pickups for humbuckers or single-coils.

But despite an increase in model options for the guitarist looking to buy, the Telecaster has always been available for purchase just as it was produced in 1951; making it the guitar with the single longest lifespan in production history. And entering its 7th decade of manufacturing, the Tele shows no signs of slowing down, still dominating stages as the preferred guitar of countless axe-men.

It’s no coincidence that the launch of the Telecaster, with its ability to reduce feedback and produce more tones at higher volumes, came at the same time as a huge transformation in pop music. Rock and roll was on the up and, as you well know, things got progressively louder.

Of course, with the thousands of guitars available and used by musicians between 1951 and today, we don’t claim that the Telecaster was solely responsible for it all.

But it definitely helped.

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