G&L
Leo Fender calledG&L Guitarsthe best instruments he ever made. Forty-five years later, the firm remains, albeit with the cachet of Leo’s name lingering above. As we learn from Steve Araujo, G&L’s jack of all trades, the future looks bright and hyper-fixated on quality
By Andrew Daly
A G&L Custom Shop Rampage 24. “The Custom Shop is relatively new,” Steve Araujo says. “It started in maybe 2017. It was this tiny snowball, and... in the past year, it has exponentially grown”
G&L GUITARS
SINCE LEO FENDER and George Fullerton properly launched G&L in 1980, the brand has been associated with high-quality instruments — but has primarily lived in the shadow of Leo’s first and namesake firm, the almighty Fender.
In the years since, G&L has dropped tasty models like the ASAT, S-500, Skyhawk, Nighthawk, Climax, Legacy and Jerry Cantrell’s beloved Rampage, which can be seen being brandished by the grunge gunslinger in Alice in Chains’ “Man in the Box” music video.
Along with those models came Leo’s remarkable MFD pickups, Dual Fulcrum Vibrato, Saddle Lock Bridge and many more mad-scientist inventions. This, along with the fact that Leo and George used to partake in quality control — even signing the neck pocket of early G&L guitars — had Leo feeling closer than close to his latter-day creations when he passed away in 1991. But that’s not all G&L is about. Just ask Steve Araujo, G&L’s director of sales who also happens to manage artist relations and the firm’s growing-by-leaps-and-bounds Custom Shop. Araujo has been with G&L for more than seven years and, in that time, has watched the company’s instruments slowly but surely infiltrate the market.