What If?

“After doing this for some 30 years, you get to see a lot of vintage Fender guitars,” says Mike Lewis, vice president of Product Development at the Fender Custom Shop, as he begins to explain the thinking behind the Vintage Custom series. “Every once in a while you see things and go, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen this before,’ or ‘Oh, I didn’t know we’d done it this way.’ It might have been a prototype, a custom order or something like that. I’ve come to believe that the early Fender factory was really a custom shop because there’s so much evidence out there of guitars that were one-offs, you know, made for people. As you know, there’s the Songbirds Guitar Museum in Chattanooga and it’s really just full of these things. There are things there that you wouldn’t believe!

“The idea was to create guitars that were prototypical or a first generation of something”

“So the idea of the Vintage Custom series was to make available