The Desirability of Vintage Guitars and Pickups.

What is it about a vintage guitar that makes it so desirable all these years later? Curiously, these old Fender guitars weren’t always so desirable. There are stories of 1950’s Fender’s being sawn for scrap or destroyed. The price of these instruments when they were only 20 years old or so proves that the vintage craze wasn’t always the status quo. Yet as time has marched on, the desirability for these old instruments has increased exponentially, marked by high prices in the used market.

My friend, Rick, has a great 1964 Candy Apple Red Stratocaster. He bought it around 1969 from a student at University of Maryland and paid $175 for it then. While it still could have been a screaming deal for the time, if the idea of Pre-CBS guitars being holy grails existed, it certainly would have been higher than that. As of the date of this blog, that equates to $1577.12 in today’s money. A current Fender American Classic Stratocaster is $1499. There’s nothing meaningful in the way of increased value at the time Rick bought his 1964 Strat that would indicate that a vintage-driven market existed.

So what changed?

As with all economic topics surrounding value, it’s complicated. For Fender, the sale for $13 million to CBS marked the first sea change in the company’s direction. The business had grown in size and value by 1965, and Leo had had enough, according to people in the company close to him. When CBS took over, they obviously had some of their own ideas. The changes weren’t all immediate and overnight, but it became clear that they were focused on fast, mass production. CBS ended the Fender “quality incentive program” that rewarded employees to prioritize quality in their work. Pickups became machine wound instead of hand-wound. Every nut and bolt was scrutinized and tracked for “cost-centers”. It’s easy to see that things were changing in some big ways. As the years went on, dealers began to complain of quality issues with setup, playability and finish. It became clear that Fender wasn’t making the same instruments they had in year past. This was probably the beginning of the perception that older Fender guitars were better than newer ones.

But wait a minute, were all those Pre-CBS instruments great? From what I’ve learned the answer is a definitive “no”. We all see and hear the magic ones that have survived the decades since their manufacture. This is partly due to “survivorship bias”. However, I can tell you first hand, there were at least some pickups in the pre-CBS era that were “duds”. There were some sets that were amazing, and no doubt entire guitars that were, and that’s what people desire. Much of this is built up by lore and the internet. However, if you ever held a pre-CBS Fender that wasn’t so hot, you’d likely have some cognitive dissonance to deal with. Big neck pocket gaps, out of place inlay dots, bad fret jobs, crude string ferrule positions, finish flaws, dead feeling and sounding pickups and so on. There were no doubt great CBS guitars, too. As with most things, it isn’t all black and white.

Let’s shift focus to what’s at the heart of my company in regards to this topic, though - pickups.

If I had to choose what the “heart” of a Fender pickup is, it’s the magnets. Fender used “AlNiCo” magnet rods in their pickups from very early on. AlNiCo was a relatively new invention that changed the world of magnets entirely. It was discovered in the early 1930s by Japanese metallurgist Tokushichi Mishima. He found that by mixing certain materials together with iron that he could create a much stronger and more “permanent” magnet than what was available at the time. In less than two decades, Fender was using this material in his first lap-steel pickup designs.

In these early days, the process for making AlNiCo magnets might be described as somewhat crude. They were sand cast then ground to their final lengths and diameters. However, the castings were often not oversized enough to allow for a total ground finish when completed, which left signs of rough casting on the sides and ends of some magnets. There were often “inclusions” in the magnets where voids had formed during the process. It’s quite possible that during the heating and heat-treating process that some of the material was better processed than others, leading to some pickup magnets being weaker than others, or unable to hold their charge long enough. Tolerances were wider, but acceptable in terms of dimensions, but alloy and magnetic properties could vary from pour to pour. If there is one thing I have learned by testing magnets from many foundries, it’s that if you don’t have a good magnet to drive the pickup, “you ain’t goin’ nowhere”.

Fender procured their alnico from several foundries. This means that not only from batch to batch, but foundry to foundry, there would be differences in just one type of AlNiCo alone. This was likely a large contributing factor to the differences in a pickups sound and feel.

Wire is the other part of the equation. Factors include the copper quality and purity at the core of the wire as well as the insulation type that coats the copper. Wire stock is drawn through many dies in order to reach it’s size - less than 0.003” in diameter. Consistency varied so some wire would be a little thicker than other wire, sometimes within the same spool. The same can be said for the insulation type and thickness. Since we live in a world of tolerances, not absolutes, this opens the door for many idiosyncrasies to exist and affect the total sum of a pickup.

Then we come to the topic of much debate and inquiry - how the wire is wound.

We basically have only a few levers to pull when it comes to winding. The tension, and the turns per layer and build pattern. A coil that is wound tightly will sound different to one that is wound loosely. A coil with a widely varied turns per layer will sound different to one with a static turns per layer(like a machine-wound pickup) and so on. A coil built up on the sides versus in the middle will sound different. Everything affects everything. Some differences are negligible, some are profound.

Hand-winding pickups on a production level like vintage Fender leaves open the possibility for hitting on some magic coil builds, but it also leaves the door open for some that are not so great, either. You have to really pay attention to what you are doing and how it affects the end result if you are going to successfully hand-wind. My guess is that very few winders at the pickup stations at vintage Fender had experience playing the instruments for which they wound their pickups. The feedback loop was incomplete in that case. If the guitar functioned and made sound, it was a success. Boutique winding is all about nailing the “special” pickups and for that to happen, it takes many years of research and development and practice with a feedback loop intact at every point in the process. For me, the goal isn’t to recreate vintage pickups exactly as they were but rather to understand why certain ones became unforgettable.

Not to sound cliché, but I think part of the story as to why vintage instruments are so lauded is our humanity. There is something of a hero story to Leo Fender starting his small company and becoming great. Every day workers were in the Fender factory unknowingly making history. When we see a neck with “T.G." penciled on it, it means more than a simple stamp. When all of the tolerances, craftsmanship and hard work came together, truly special instruments were created. That’s a kind of magic. Understanding that is what has driven my work for years. Not to recreate every vintage pickup, but to understand how important those pickups were to those special guitars and what gave them some of that “magic”.