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| Fender Telecaster 50th Anniversary edition. |
Everybody inside the music industry and even music fans are aware of the influence Fender made to music for more than 60 decades. Fender right now produces a variety of guitars (electric and acoustic), basses (electric and acoustic), guitar amps, and bass amps. Back in 1945 when Leo Fender created Fender Company, his main interested was to build electric guitars. The first and one of the most famous electric guitar Leo invented (along with the creation of the Stratocaster later in 1954) was the Telecaster.
The Fender Telecaster was the first guitar that was designed toward to mass production. Also, it was the guitar that “put the solid-body guitar on the map” (Bacon & Day, 1998). The Telecaster’s single coil pickups (guitar’s microphones) gave the guitar a rich high frequency response complemented by a warm lows. These guitars have been used in almost all genres of music (rock, jazz, country, pop, latin, etc) merging its sound since the beginning of the 50’s up to today’s society.
Classic bands like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Queens, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, the Police, and Led Zeppelin used the Telecaster guitar in their recordings and live performances. Also, newer bands like Pearl Jam, Arcade Fire, Foo Fighters, MUSE, U2, and Prince uses the Telecaster extendedly in their recording and live performances.
One of the most outstanding characteristics of the Fender Telecaster guitar is the capability to customize it. The use of different pickups and/or textures from the pickups itself helps to give a different “character” to each mod. Some of the most popular versions of the Telecaster are the Thinline, Deluxe, Plus, Jr, J5 Triple Deluxe, etc. Also, the Telecaster has the advantage of being a solid-body guitar, which it makes it harder to break than the hollow body guitars.
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| Keith Richards live with his 52' Telecaster named "Micawber". |
In my opinion, the Telecaster is one of the guitars that changed the music. It can be proven by the vast of records that has been used since its creation in the late 40’s. The Telecaster is a guitar that posses crunchy high frequencies that are an advantage when doing solos and also provides a warm low-end that can be used to play rhythmic parts (riffs).
See "Reference" tab for information about the sources.
It's cool that you chose to do your project on this guitar. I'd never really appreciated each guitars unique sound until coming to Full Sail and meeting some guitar players or musicians that had an understanding for the difference in sound. Initially, to me, a guitar was a guitar and that was it. Your review on the amount of people that have used this guitar to get their signature sound, including Keith Richards was awesome. I really like the way you incorporated pictures into your blog as well. It really added some dimensions to the post that were refreshing and made for a much more visually interesting page. It would be interesting to have a lecture on the difference between the Gibson guitars and the Fender Guitars and hear some significant differences as I know those two are talked of a lot. Ultimately, good sound starts with a good player but it's really cool to see just how many of the bands we listen to have implemented the Fender Telecaster and how much we've become accustomed to that specific sound. Good job on the post.
ReplyDeleteI have actually returned to your blog to comment again because I was so impressed by the previous entry I had commented on. And I must say you have impressed me again. While I am not a personal fan of the Telecaster, I still can appreciate its adaptability and tone. I totally agree that the telecaster had played a crucial role in the evolution of “that guitar tone” and its wide use is purely evident of such. Again your writing is clear, and demonstrates your mastery of critical and descriptive writing styles. If this were to be a blog you continued to write after this course, I would continue to read it regularly.
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