Fender acoustic owners.

[FoxHound4690]

Hey AGF,
Question regarding Fender acoustics.

Are they any good?

I'm only curious because someone I know who has been playing guitar for decades said to me Fender have never made an acoustic guitar worth a darn thing.

All you guys that have played/owned acoustic Fenders. what are your thoughts on them?

[jcpharm]

i have never owned a fender acoustic guitar.

but there's a reason for that....

in all seriousness, for me, it's because there has always been a better sounding guitar in that same price range comparatively (to my ears). that's not to say Fender is not capable of making a nicer guitar, but i haven't personally experienced one that was worth owning to me.

PS: i own a Fender (American-made) bass (so i'm not hating on the brand/company)

[Peepaw]

Originally Posted by FoxHound4690

Hey AGF,
Question regarding Fender acoustics.

Are they any good?

I'm only curious because someone I know who has been playing guitar for decades said to me Fender have never made an acoustic guitar worth a darn thing.

All you guys that have played/owned acoustic Fenders. what are your thoughts on them?

I agree with your friend. Electrics are a different story.

[FoxHound4690]

Originally Posted by Peepaw

I agree with your friend. Electrics are a different story.

The electrics do seem to be a different story when it comes to Fender. Every man and his dog wants to own a strat or a tele and every time someones talking about Fender it's just "Stratocaster this or Telecaster that" but the acoustics just never seem to get talked about.

[RalphH]

I highly doubt they couldn't make a great acoustic if they wanted to.

They're just not really into it. Unlike say Gibson, Fender started as an electric guitar company and that's always been their focus.

[RP]

Deja vu! Seems like we just enjoyed this thread https://www.acousticguitarforum.com/...=fender&page=3 and it became testy and locked down by post #44.

I've never played a Fender acoustic but can say that their electric offerings have always worn a large pair of shoes which their acoustic offerings going back to the 1960s never came close to filling...

[ManyMartinMan]

Yep. Just last week. Maybe the two can be merged.

[Wade Hampton]

Fender has made some really fine-sounding acoustic guitars at various times in their corporate history, but it's never been the company's main mission or anything they've sustained for very long. Sometime in the late 1990's they bought a two man small shop operation in Tennessee that was essentially making good quality all-solid wood Martin copies.

I had heard about that somewhere and when I visited Disney World in Florida with my family in 1998, there was a restaurant and night club area where they had a guitar store selling some fairly high end instruments. That store had two of these high end Made-In-Tennessee Fender acoustic guitars, an OM and a dreadnought, and they were both very good guitars.

That Tennessee venture lasted about a year and a half, maybe two years, before Fender shut it down, and those two guitars I played in Florida are the only two I've ever seen, much less played.

Fender has done similar things a few times over the years, but never with any sustained effort or with a media push sufficient to get the word out.

That's in North America, mind you. They might be having high end guitars built in China and selling them in domestic Asian markets, and unless one of us happened to visit a Tokyo or Seoul music store we'd never know anything about it.

What I suspect is that Fender realizes that its real value in the North American marketplace is with its electric guitars and amplifiers, and that beginner and midrange instruments in their acoustic guitar product line is about all the domestic market will sustain.

Fender did have a higher end acoustic guitar product line for a few years when they purchased the Guild brand name, but they didn't do much with it and eventually they sold the company off to the Cordoba Music Group, which seems to be doing marginally better with the Guild line.

Anyway, I do think that Fender acoustic guitars do get sneered at sometimes, but since acoustic guitars are not and really never have been the major focus of the company, perhaps that's to be expected. Unfair as it may be.


Wade Hampton Miller

[Kitkatjoe]

Originally Posted by FoxHound4690

Hey AGF,
Question regarding Fender acoustics.

Are they any good?

I'm only curious because someone I know who has been playing guitar for decades said to me Fender have never made an acoustic guitar worth a **** thing.

All you guys that have played/owned acoustic Fenders. what are your thoughts on them?

The great Johnny Cash played one in concerts in the 1960s.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by Kitkatjoe

The great Johnny Cash played one in concerts in the 1960s.

If you have to go back 50+ years to find someone of import playing a Fender acoustic, I think you've inadvertently made the point that Fender hasn't been very good on the acoustic front.

Originally Posted by jim1960

If you have to go back 50+ years to find someone of import playing a Fender acoustic, I think you've inadvertently made the point that Fender hasn't been very good on the acoustic front.

Also consider how loaded Cash was in the 60s...

[Wade Hampton]

I don't think it matters how high Johnny Cash might or might not have been. More to the point, there were lots of country singers and band frontmen who played Fender acoustic guitars onstage because Fender gave away a LOT of them to prominent country musicians.

If you ever get a chance to play one of those mid-1960's Fender acoustics with the big steel rod running through the middle of the body cavity, you'll be able to hear for yourself why they're not considered to be the pinnacle of acoustic guitar design. There were a lot of those floating around when I was first starting to play guitar in the 1970's, and I never heard one that sounded very good. The truth is that most of them tended to sound awful.


whm

[cb1956]

Go try some and decide for yourself.
I have two, both solid spruce top and laminated sides and back.
They both sound good and play easy.
Are they the best in the world? No. I wouldn't expect them to be at those prices. Are they decent beginner intermediate instruments? Yes.
Good enough to play out with? Yes and I have.

My dreadnought has solid spruce top, laminate rosewood back and sides, scalloped bracing, Tusq nut and brisge saddle, Rolled fretboard edges, Fishman electronics and a cutaway. $400 new with case. Sounds great. The only thing coming out of the guitar that sounds bad is due to operator error.

My Parlor has solid spruce top, laminate mahogany back and sides. Sounds good, plays easy. $200.

I can afford them and I'm not good enough to need anything super fancy.

[Kitkatjoe]

[QUOTE=jim1960;6275681]If you have to go back 50+ years to find someone of import playing a Fender acoustic, I think you've inadvertently made the point that Fender hasn't been very good on the acous






I have not made a point about anything except what I said about Cash. Now if you or anyone else wants to build a commentary about Fender guitars being bad to your ears do it. 😾

[Wade Hampton]

It appears that this thread has unexpectedly turned into a minefield, which certainly wasn't my intent. I don't care to make things worse, so my apologies to anyone who was offended by what I wrote.


whm