From its lightweight beginnings creating electric lap steels in Leo Fender’s California radio store through the very early 1940s, Fender has grown into a major international brand that not only involves a variety of guitar marques, such as Squier, Gretsch, Guild, Jackson/Charvel, Tacoma and SWR, but provides even branched around into avenues as different as auto music, in cooperation with Volkswagen, and vintage fashioned tennis shoes.
It’s challenging picture now, but at the end of the seventies, the future featured bleak for Fender. There was clearly an often-justified opinion of thaifriendly Cena decreasing high quality throughout the previous fifteen years since Leo Fender had sold the firm having their identity towards U.S. broadcasting company CBS. Contributing to Fender’s issues is increased competitors from affordable brought in guitars, a lot of that have been built in Japan during the time.
Even though the American-made guitars comprise regarded as getting increasingly worse, the Japanese-made products were certainly getting best. Indeed, firms including Tokai Gakki and FujiGen Gakki, that also made Ibanez instruments, were making products which were exceptionally close reproductions regarding the Stratocasters and Telecasters created by Fender during the halcyon days of the later part of the ‘50s and early ‘60s.
At the outset of the 1980s, however, two big and interrelated occasions taken place that propelled Fender’s transformation into an international brand: the introduction of the Squier subsidiary and also the creation of Fender Japan Ltd.
A Major International Views
In 1981, CBS introduced another a brand new management team to make Fender about. Continue reading “A brief overview of Squier: beginnings of Fender MIJ, spending budget Superstrats & More”