Revamped with a Seth Lover humbucker in 1972, the Telecaster Custom won a place in the hearts of Fender devotees.

BY DAVE HUNTER

FENDER FIRST CONCEIVED a fancied-up version of the stalwart Telecaster in 1958, and released it as the Telecaster Custom at the 1959 NAMM show. For more than two decades, the new model was offered alongside the original Telecaster, and while it brought body binding and a sunburst finish as standard to Fender’s seminal original cutaway, it otherwise wasn’t different. The model also received a rosewood fingerboard, which made it look a little more like traditional electric guitars produced by other makers, but the standard Tele received that too around the same time.

This 1974 Fender Telecaster Custom sports a lovely Walnut finish.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOBY SESSIONS

By the early 1970s, however, the Telecaster Custom was primed to become something quite different, taking an evolutionary leap forward in Fender terms, while arguably lurching further away from future collectability status relative to the bound-bodied Customs of the pre-CBS and early CBS years. The genesis of the Custom’s redesign occurred in 1967, when Fender hired former Gibson engineer Seth Lover, one of the main men behind the legendary Gibson humbucking pickup released a decade previously. By 1970, Lover had developed a humbucker for Fender, too, known as the Wide Range Humbucking Pickup. Although the unit looked a little like a Gibson humbucker from the outside, it was a little larger and constructed quite differently inside. Rather than the single alnico bar magnet mounted beneath and between the two coils, as on the Gibson humbucker, the Wide Range pickup used individual pole pieces made from cunife magnets, a blend of copper, nickel and ferrite. The Wide Range has the sonic characteristics of humbuckers, but the use of magnets within the coils, something seen in all significant Fender pickup designs, also helps them retain characteristic Fender clarity and twang.