I love it when a company re-invents a line. The Fender American Vintage Series has been a mainstay product line for Fender for many years – probably their oldest product line – and they’ve completely recently re-vamped the series with all hand-made in the US of A. Now normally when I get news of Fender doing anything “new,” my reaction is typically, “meh.”
But this news intrigued me because of the detail that Fender took in re-creating these guitars from actual vintage models; making direct measurements to the instruments themselves as opposed to going off blueprints, and more importantly creating period-correct pickups. Then when I reviewed the Fender American Vintage Series site itself, I smiled to see that what Fender was creating was NEW guitars, not banged up relicked ones like the Roadworn Series.
So what you get with these guitars is brand-new, showroom-quality guitars built as if you were buying them when they were released. That’s a deal-maker for me! And these aren’t cheap offshore repros. They brought production back to the US for these and that pleases me – a lot. So American-made, period-correct, fresh-off-the-showroom-floor guitars? SOLD!
My personal favorite is the ’58 Telecaster – I love blondes. 🙂 John 5 compared that to his own ’58 and said he’d put his own safely under the bed and take the new on the road with him. What an endorsement!
Guitar Gear 
I had been wanting to add a Tele’ to my collection for a long time – a nice one. I was eying the American Deluxe. The Guitar Center had a ’52 hanging next to the Deluxe, so I decided to do a side by side. I went back and forth, playing through a Fender ’65 Reissue Deluxe Reverb amp for over an hour. I can only differentiate by the raw feel, and for reference I found the Tele’ Deluxe to be a beautiful instrument. You know how sometimes when you sit down to play and you’ve got to think about what your playing – this riff, that song – guiding your playing, and then other times you sit down and hit a chord or a couple notes of a riff and suddenly you just start following a trail of music from the inside; creating on the spot; it just comes out of you? That was the difference. It was weird. Every time I picked up the Deluxe, I thought my way through what I was playing. Every time I picked up the ’52, music just flowed; my own unique, unplanned output, and I loved it. I lost all thought. There was a visceral resonance with the ’52, more so than with any other guitar I’ve ever played. Not only was the experience transcendent, it even smells good – old lacquer, found hiding at the back of some forgotten storeroom. I love this guitar; I think it’s got a living soul of it’s own
Mario, thank you for sharing that! You’ve verbalized EXACTLY the experience I look for when evaluating gear. With practically every guitar I’ve purchased, that has been the experience I’ve had. It’s purely visceral, and it’s the line between creating music or just playing notes. ROCK ON!