Rosewood has been an option ever since, on Japanese and American Fender models.

Up to 1957 all Fenders had a maple fingerboard. Solid colours usually conceal an alder, poplar and basswood carcass. Models with translucent finishes will generally have an ash body as it has a prettier grain pattern. The two biggest: bolt-on maple necks and single coil pickups. While there have been many exceptions over the years, the classic Tele and Strat share a few family traits. Listen to Jimi Hendrix playing Little Wing for a textbook example of the neck/middle pups in cahoots. Strat pickups should sound warm and woody with a hint of 'plink', like flicking the rim of a wine glass with your fingernail.Īrguably the most iconic Strat tones are combinations of bridge or neck pickup with the middle pup. A Tele can mimic a big-bodied jazz guitar, a country pedal steel, and a Les Paul.Ī great Stratocaster will pump out what guitar connoisseurs describe as 'glassy' tones. This is the guitar that links country jazz players like Danny Gatton to classic rocker Pete Townshend of The Who and Slipknot's masks metalhead Jim Root. They might have come off the same drawing board but the Tele and Strat have very distinct tonal palettes. The Stratocaster was born and like its older brother has never been out of production. Rather than mercilessly tweak the Tele, Leo's team decided to create a new model. They wanted an extra pickup, a more comfortably contoured body, and a vibrato unit.

Fender's customers loved the Tele but requested some spec tweaks. After a dispute with Gretsch, Fender rechristened its new guitar the Telecaster in 1952 and it's been in production ever since. Soon after the two-pup Broadcaster was revealed. By the following year, a single pickup version called the Esquire was launched. Leo Fender and his team in Fullerton, California, began work on the guitar that would become the Telecaster back in 1949. Let's try to settle the Strat vs Tele debate once and for all. They probably feel the same to play? Try again. If you think they sound the same, you're wrong. But which guitar is the right one for you? Well, allow us to talk you through the differences between these iconic planks.

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