Fender Highlights Customization With New Player II Modification Series

Put a guitar in the hands of an artist like Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Tom Morello and you have a template, not a finished product.

Since Leo Fender started Fender with repairable guitars, that concept of adaptability has been at the core of the Fender guitar. Now the company is bringing that to the forefront with the new Player II Modified series, “Featuring select electric guitar and bass models enhanced with performance-driven upgrades, Player II Modified offers modern players refined tone, performance, and style straight out of the box,” according to a press release.

I spoke with Justin Norvell, EVP of Product, and Jason Klein, Artist Marketing Lead, for an in-depth look at how customization has shaped Fender’s history and instruments.

Steve Baltin: So where are you guys today?

Justin Norvell: I’m LA -based, but I’m in our Arizona office.

Jason Klein: I’m in the Kurt Cobain room in our Fender office in LA.

Norvell: Our different conference rooms and common rooms, like there are pictures on the wall. There’s Nile Rogers, Johnny Marr, we have Clapton, George Harrison, we just name them all instead of some other name for the rooms.

Klein: My personal favorite’s the Tom Morello editing bay.

Baltin: Does Tom ever come in there?

Klein: Sure, yeah.

Baltin: That actually is a good lead in cause my guess is you get a lot of really cool product ideas and ideas for what you want to do going forward dealing with all these artists who have so many innovative ideas.

Norvell: All the way back, Leo Fender was a repair guy. He was a service guy, radio repair guy. So, he decided to build guitars that were repairable. He made a modular, because if you look at an old hollow body, an old jazz guitar, if the neck twists or something happens, it’s broken. So, he created this bolted together Henry Ford style guitar, but it was too service. But players took that modularity and were like, “I can upgrade, change, modify, get a guitar out of a pawn shop, hack the wood out of it and throw different pickups in it and start doing all this different stuff.” That’s what’s kind of led to this, the modular nature of Fenders, which is unique, has led to modification from Kurt Cobain right behind him had a Jaguar that famously had two big humbuckers in it and he changed the switching and everybody, like most of our signature models, Johnny Marr has a blade switch and different electronics in his and Eric Clapton has a boost circuit in his. It’s like a base platform that then you can personalize to your own style and taste, and it can evolve with you too through your life.

Klein: Yeah, a lot of the mods can be done DIY. We had artists like Hendrix and Clapton, who were modifying their three -way switches with matchsticks to create extra spaces and the pickups to up to create more sonic sounds. And then years later, we have the five-way switch. It’s just like paying attention to our artists and the changes they make. And it’s this great reciprocal thing back and forth.

Norvell: It’s like crowdsourcing before crowdsourcing existed.

Klein: Yeah, particularly just hearing what people are doing with stuff. Then we made modifications to our products based upon what people were doing with them.

Baltin: The pawn shops thing is interesting to me because as a music geek I read all these memoirs like Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards, and they can’t really afford new guitars, so they’ll buy something at a pawn shop and make something out of nothing. I imagine it starts from there.

Norvell: Yeah, and a lot of artists throughout their career continue changing and evolving their gear because that never goes away. Experimentation leads to innovation. It’s not just “I want X sound out of my pickups or whatever,” it’s literally making changes to the instrument, which can change the way it sounds, it reacts to change the way it feels, and it can build something new. Putting a big beyond a Tele can change [so much]. Everything’s all liquid and swimming now and it changes the whole artist’s sound or something.

Klein: The pawn shop thing is interesting. It’s cool to see how genres can actually come out of the ability to obtain certain instruments. The Jazzmaster, for instance, is a very high-end instrument made for jazz, and it was meant to be played a certain way. Then, as it ebbs and flows with musical trends, it became really common in pawn shops. So, then you had all the bands that would create shoegaze and grunge and noise rock buying Jazzmasters and Jaguars cause they were obtainable. And then it creates entire genres and trends from that. It’s very cool to see.

Baltin: Is there one sound or one thing that emerged that surprised you guys the most and that you got most excited about?

Norvell: Yeah, all of that stuff. Distortion, which is now a mainstay of someone’s sound was an accident, like amps weren’t supposed to drive that hard or whatever. And the tremolo was supposed to approximate a classical guitar player, and it was used for all those whaling solos that Hendrix did. So, all that stuff’s crazy. I would say, for Fender, it’s the putting a humbucker, which is more like a Gibson style thing, into a Stratocaster or a Telecaster, which created this kind of hybrid instrument. It used to be like Fenders were single coils and were clean. Then there were other brands that did other stuff. Players started taking stuff and hacking openings. Edward Van Halen, his main guitar was kind of a Stratocaster-esque self-built guitar that he very crudely put a humbucker in. That started a whole revolution of modification in the late ’70s to this day of people taking routers and drills and stuff to their instruments and it’s really its own cottage industry. If you look into it, there are people that sell templates, and they sell all these different things and you can buy any type of Stratocaster aftermarket pickguard with any type of number of different holes or different pickup configurations. There’s a whole modification industry that now exists based upon this obsession.

Klein: Yeah, and it’s still super strong. Speaking to how our guitars are modular and they can be combined, you have artists like Nick Reinhart who you’re speaking with today and Mk.gee who’s creating a new sound by mixing Jaguar and baritone components and then using other preamps to create this sound that is super unique and harkens back to a little bit of a Pink Floyd thing but sounds totally new and really could only be done by combining these two Fender instruments .

Baltin: Has there been one that people come to you and you’re like “This is crazy, but it’s awesome?”

Norvell: I think there are some that really want to deconstruct and modify the instrument deeply. And that’s cool, but then when you’re talking about Ed Van Halen and Eric Johnson as a guitar player, those people have the kind of dog whistle hearing that is on a different plane. When we were voicing amp’s, pickups, guitars with Ed, it was years and it was tiny detail things, but things that they could hear that they were or were not reacting to. And Eric Johnson, I think the first time we did a guitar with him, we went through 69 sets of pickups. He can hear the most subtle things in instruments. I think that’s a thing that keeps us honest, as we’re kind of testing these things out in the world. But then there’s this guitar behind me that’s three humbuckers, chrome pickguard and a Strat head stuck on a Tele with a strap tremolo on it. So that’s John 5, who played with Rob Zombie and is in Motley Crue right now. So yeah, these things are just platforms for people to express. That right there is the Malcolm Young from AC/DC and it’s got holes in it because he pulled the pickups out and it’s just open. So, some of it’s to upgrade it and make it look beautiful and sometimes it’s just a complete Frankenstein garage project. But it’s fascinating; it runs the gamut from someone wanting to take a chisel and a hammer to a guitar and make it look really rough; the Sonic Youth guys had these satin finished very not cosmetically like overdone instruments, and then some people go hyper-detailed and hyper-nuanced and want it to be like Strata various to use a pun.

Klein: Yeah, and it’s cool. I really like seeing how these really big mods and the things that are grand adjustments to a guitar lead to quality-of-life changes in our products as they come out in real time. So, as a bass player myself the preamp and the new player mods is just a major improvement on past preamps where you can blend in passive control, have like a much more refined EQ. Those conversations are through ongoing mods and custom projects and whatever with our bass players and experimenting with preamps until we get to this space where we have the perfect preamp in our player model line. It’s this ongoing process of starting really big or granular or making big changes to the instruments and just refining it to a point that it’s this great quality-of-life adjustment too.

Norvell: This series is reminding people of the modification nature of the instruments and how important it is and how you can very simply make upgrades. Locking tuners, noiseless pickups, different wiring, like treble bleed circuits and stuff like that. That’s all stuff that takes a baseline instrument and knocks it up a couple levels. It really is doing as has been done since the earliest days of Fender and it just keeps evolving.

Baltin: How does all this tie together for the player mod campaign?

Norvell: We’re working with IDLES and stuff like that. The player series is our best-selling series of instruments. We took the player series and said, “What are the most desirable or easily upgradable modifications that would be compelling to musicians as that level up if you just want to say this is cool as a base model, but I want something that’s a little bit plus.” That’s why we’re talking about new preamps, active passive bases, we have improved bridges, new different wiring, better pickups, locking tuners, all of that stuff. This is not a vintage replica guitar. This is a modern contemporary taking these classic forms, Strat, Tele, PJ, et cetera, to their contemporary height as products. So, it’s like if you took your hot rod in somewhere and said, “Do your thing, this is what someone would do.” And then the way that we’re taking that out to the world is telling the story of modification as a hallmark of Fender, a hallmark of what our artists have always done to our instruments.

Klein: It was important for us to work with artists that embody that. So be it the sounds they’re creating and sonically and who their audience is and what they’re interested in, but also the individual players in the bands or the ones done with the instruments and our history with them and what we know they do with their guitars. So, it was a very organic fit. IDLES, sonically they really do embody this, taking things to a next level by mixing genres, but always keeping the core aggression of being a punk band. And we’ve been modifying their guitars for years.