With nearly a decade of experience under his belt and everything he needed, Leo founded “Fender Electric Instruments” in 1948. Leo Fender is clearly a brilliant innovator, tireless tinkerer, and also a dutiful listener. He also had the strength of character to surround himself with talented, innovative minds and working musicians for input and critique, rather than yes-men.

“He was striving to do the very best that he could for musicianship, to make his products ahead of the pack, and he knew that the working musician was the secret to all of that.”

~Bill Carson

From the start, he’d already had most of his dream team assembled, including right-hand, George Fullerton, and craftsmen like the now-legendary Tadio Gomez. Musician/consultant Bill Carson and future Fender vice president Clarence White joined shortly after. With all hands on deck, “Captain” Leo and his crew are poised to sail popular music on a brand-new tack and to destinations never imagined. To say that Fender helped change history is a gross understatement. Leo and the crew's creations literally are history. 

During his 17-year run at the helm, Fender introduced the high-powered Tweed series, the “piggy pack” Brown-Panel, and reverb-equipped Black-Panel line of amps. He’s the man behind the Telecaster, Stratocaster, Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Electric VII guitars, and the Precision and Jazz bass guitars, and more. He started out with bold moves, introducing two world-changing designs: the world's first Bass and Solid-Body Electric Guitars.  

Leo Fender’s was an entirely different, more modern approach to the electrified Guitar. Until Fender came to town, all the other major guitar manufacturers had spent the 1st half of the 20th century trying to make acoustic guitars louder. Not bound by tradition, Fender found the idea of an electrified acoustic archtop that generates feedback nonsensical and outdated. A solid-body guitar (like the electro-Hawaiian lap steels he’d been making at K&F) seemed like the only logical way forward. 76 years later, history shows how right Leo was. 

The Fender Telecaster became the world's first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar upon its introduction in 1952. With nothing else in its class that came before to glean inspiration from, the Telecaster is an original, if ever there was one. Leo Fender's most recent (and only) experience in guitar manufacturing was producing the Electro-Hawaiian Steel Guitars with Doc Kaufman at K&F. The Telecaster is a vastly different animal from the electrified archtop Guitars popular since the late 30s. Aside from the solid-body design, the most obvious visual cue is the bolt-on neck, but a more decisive factor in the Tele’s unique new sound is less visible.  The Telecasters' “zero degree” neck pitch is much more closely related to lap-steel construction than to the steep, violin-like angle found on electrified archtops. The lack of neck pitch allowed Fender to use a one-piece bridge/tailpiece design, with a canted pickup and a string-through-body system, similar to Fender’s Champion Lap steel model. It’s these factors that significantly influence the Telecasters’ famously twangy tone. 

At first, the radical new solid-body guitar met with resistance from the Jazz guitarists Leo hoped to attract. However, Country, Western Swing, and blues guitarists instantly gravitated to the Tele’s hot sound over the cool tone of the electric archtop. Today, the Telecaster is embraced by players of every musical style imaginable. Like the P-Bass, Fender nailed it from jump street. The Telecaster has changed very little since its introduction, and well over 250 separate Telecaster models/variations have been made by Fender over the decades. More still were copied by others. Three-quarters of a Century since its arrival, the Telecaster remains one of the world’s best-loved models. 

 For Leo Fender, creating the Solid-body electric Guitar was simply building a better mousetrap, which would, in turn, sell more of his amps. For the rest of us around the globe, their arrival was like letting a genie out of the bottle that would never go back inside. The solid-body guitar made it possible to push Fender's powerful amps to their limits without causing runaway feedback. When cranked up, the overdriven tubes create tonal artifacts in the form of rich harmonics, grit, and compression, allowing far greater sustain. The result is a new kind of expressiveness, in a manner never before attainable on the guitar. From Muddy Waters to Jeck Beck, and everyone that’s ever turned up, the sound is the birth cry of a new kind of guitar hero.