![]() ![]() If you're not comfortable removing the neck of a guitar to peek at the date marker, I encourage you to take it to a local tech or luthier. Here is what the neck date and body date look like from a 1952 Telecaster: These dates will tell when the original part was manufactured, but are not exact indicators of when the guitar was actually put together and finished. Through much of Fender's production history, Fender workers would print or write a production date on both bodies and necks where the two pieces meet. Learn everything you need to know to choose the right Stratocaster for you. For Fender during the turning point era of the mid-'60s, check out Fender and the CBS Takeover. Similarly, take a look at Behold the Jazzmaster for general timeline of the history of everyone's favorite offset guitar. There's A Brief History of the Stratocaster Part I and Part II that follows the evolution of the most popular Fender guitar of all. We also have some other blog posts related to Fender that can hopefully be of some help. Some browsing around the Fender section of the Price Guide can definitely help you find which model you have. This can be a tall order for someone less versed in guitar history, but we do have some resources here on Reverb to help you out.įor starters, there's the Reverb Price Guide which has thousands of entries with pictures and details on various guitars and other gear. Perhaps the best place to start when dating your Fender is to get an approximate idea of the era based on the instrument's design and components. Once you have the information you need, if you're interested in selling your Fender, you can use Reverb to get it in front of the largest audience of musicians in the world by clicking on this link. Instead, the best approach to dating a Fender is to combine indicators from the design of the instrument, the dates found on the neck and body, along with the serial number. This also means that various parts used on a particular guitar may have come from different points in time, so no single number can absolutely define when the instrument was built. Features like bolt-on necks and pickups wired into the pickguard all helped the Fender factory churn out guitar after guitar, day after day. His guitars were built en masse by an entire factory, not a single luthier toiling over one instrument at a time. Like Henry Ford, part of Leo Fender's genius was in optimizing the company's production efficiency. While tweed Champs and blackface Princetons are commanding prices of over a grand on Ebay, you can grab the little Musicmaster Bass for around $250, and those with the energy and desire to take on a search could very well turn one up in a pawn shop or used music shop for less.The most important thing to keep in mind when dating a Fender is the highly modular nature of the designs. It should be noted here that, as is often the case, what is good for a guitar is also good for harp, and the Musicmaster Bass amp really shines with the sounds of a little tin sandwich being pumped into it through a decent microphone. If cranked, the clean becomes a fabulous dirty crunch with plenty of room to be heard in a smaller combo situation. The amp can provide excellent clean tones at lower volumes. Many players prefer to swap out the CTS speaker for something more to their liking, but the stock piece still delivers decent sound and is desired by some. Nothing fancy here, but it delivers in the sound department. There is a simple slider on/off switch, one knob for volume, one for tone. Laid out simply, the amp produces twelve watts with either 6v6 or 6aq5 preamp tubes. The Musicmaster Bass amp is a great way to get good tone from an honest vintage Fender tube amp without needing to take out a bank loan. Gradually the news spread that the Musicmaster Bass, while doing little for bass amplification, could flat scorch with a guitar, a situation which was something of a mirror of Fender’s initial bass amp offering, the Bassman. Somewhere along the line, however, a guitarist was hard up for something to power his six string, and a guitar got plugged into one of these things. Created as a practice amplifier for bedroom work, the amp really doesn’t do much at all for bass, with many bassists feeling that above 4 on the volume knob there really just isn’t much to it. ![]() One particular piece of equipment that illustrates this point well is Fender’s Musicmaster Bass amplifier. As is often the case, those low-dollar pieces of past years that got passed over so readily have become items of value to players these days. In the 70s Fender produced a line of budget music gear under the “Musicmaster” name. Looking for real vintage tube gear but not blessed with unlimited funds? There may not be a free tweed Champ or blackface Super Reverb sitting on ever corner, but there are still deals to be had straight from Leo himself. ![]()
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