The Best Year of the Telecaster? 1952 Fender Telecaster

Chadwick and the gang fire up a beautiful piece of Fender history.

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This is it, THE ’52 Tele. The body has aged nicely with some serious elbow wear along the lower bout as well the usual play wear on the guard and other chips along the side. There’s a patch of finish worn away along the treble side of the bridge but overall the guitar looks great for its age. The back and sides are well worn with a few patches of buckle rash and a good amount of wear around the edges but it all just adds to the character of this amazing instrument. Most of the neck lacquer has worn away leaving a nice smooth matte finish that feels great to play. The fretboard has seen some serious play but it is free of any dings or divots. The headstock has held up nicely with just some minor wear around the edges including a nice cigarette burn in the usual spot. This Tele is a twang machine and easily one of the best 52’s we’ve ever seen!

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 so, in 1949, he built a better prototype. Though it was long understood that solid construction offered great advantages in electric instruments and the then-small Audiovox company had apparently offered a modern, solid-body electric guitar as early as the mid-1930s, no commercial solid-body Spanish guitars had ever caught on. Fender sought to change that.

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More Vintage Demos!
1957 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster: https://youtu.be/uIPic-CEIqM
1960 Sunburst Fender Telecaster Custom: https://youtu.be/huCF1rJJWG0
1952 Goldtop Gibson Les Paul: https://youtu.be/J2KUhOMrfYk

Gear Used:
1952 Fender Telecaster Butterscotch Blond
Louis Electric Deluxe Reverb

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00:00 Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen
00:31 1952 Fender Telecaster
01:04 ’52 Tele strumming through Louis Deltone Reverb Amp
01:43 ’52 Tele picking through Louis Deltone Reverb Amp