Fender American Professional Classic models are the pinnacle of the guitar maker’s craft

In the Fender guitar factory in Corona, California, beneath the gaze of the game-changing riff-masters (Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott, Jeff Beck) whose action-shot portraiture hangs high on the walls, the morning shift is hitting all the right notes – if those notes were the sound of whirring, sawing, sanding, buzzing, banging and clanking.

All this sweet industrial music is the sound of a hand-tooled production line, of multiple squads of dusty, visored, apron-wearing craftspeople building the 79-year-old company’s next generation of instruments: the American Professional Classic series.

‘People have this idea that when we mass-produce guitars, you throw a piece of wood in a giant machine and it spits out a guitar at the other end,’ says Allen Abbassi, director of Product Management at Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. We do take advantage of modern technology with CNC machines that cut the bodies and necks initially. But there are over 150 hand processes that our operators perform on these guitars when they’re building them.’

After a protective goggle-sporting tour of the Corona facility – where the action is louder than many of the gigs I’ve been to – 52 miles east of Fender’s corporate HQ in Los Angeles, I can confirm that Stratocasters, Telecasters, Jazzmasters and Jaguars are indeed built, with care and precision, from scratch over some 22 days, starting with sawmilled hunks of ash, alder and rosewood. And also what Abbassi says is true: ‘The guys in the factory [are] artisans.’

Fender doesn’t just build guitars in the USA. The company’s factories in Mexico, China, Indonesia and India take care of more volume-focused models, including the Squier sub-brand, while Japan is another source of more specialist models. Corona, however, remains the motherlode, the most visible demonstration of the art and craft of modern guitar making.

‘The computerisation is really just to nail the geometry and the math,’ says Justin Norvell, president of Fender’s Americas division, talking of the iconic curves and contours of the company’s foundational rock’n’roll guitars, when we meet the following day in his Hollywood office. ‘Then hands blend everything and make everything work and get everything to fit – and wake it up as a product.

‘It’s not just the ingredients coming together,’ this tattooed C-suite rock stan continues. ‘It’s a system, and it’s the way that we put it together. If I make a meal next to a master chef out of the same recipe, mine’s not gonna be as good as theirs. So that love, that hand care – sanding off the edges of the fretboard that makes your hand fit like your best pair of jeans – is all-important to what makes these instruments iconic.’

With this new range, that iconography continues. The American Professional Classic series is ‘kind of a little brother to the American Professional series’, explains Abbassi. He’s standing, cradling one of the box-fresh new instruments, shiny racks of others behind him, in a demonstration space outside a Fender HQ meeting room labelled ‘Johnny Marr’ (one of the company’s ambassadors).

‘The “Classic” part is that all these guitars have a vintage vibe to them. In the 1950s and 1960s, Fender used very specific parts and styles of pick-ups. All these guitars represent that very well – they have vintage-style bridges and tuners. So they have this really beautiful, bell-like, chime-y sound that Fender’s known for,’ he says, pealing out a chord. ‘All the instruments are very personal,’ Abbassi adds. ‘They can be used for virtually any kind of music, from rock to funk to blues to punk.’

And they’re ready to rock. For all their design studio beauty, with a (relatively) accessible starting price-point of $1,499.99/£1,499 (€1,799, AUD2,599, ¥242,000), ‘these are road-worthy, ready-for-the-stage guitars that you could grab right off the hook [in] a store and go right to a gig and play’.

That vintage DNA is equally represented in the new series’ look. The colourways are also heritage: in the mid-20th century, Fender ‘borrowed’ from American car companies, spraying exactly the same lacquer paint on their guitars. ‘Lake Placid Blue Metallic was probably on some old Ford,’ says Abbassi. ‘Firemist Gold, Sherwood Green Metallic – these are all colours from the 1950s and 1960s.’

To put a contemporary spin on these heritage hues (which also include Dakota Red, Butterscotch Blonde and what Abbassi accurately describes as ‘the most ubiquitous and fan-favourite Fender colour of all time’, 3-Colour Sunburst), Fender has, paradoxically, found something ‘new and exciting’ by fading some of them, just as those old automobile lacquer paints would have faded.

The team researched washed-out, 70-year-old guitars online and at storied dealers such as Norman’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana, California. Then they chose the hues they wanted, finessing those with paint company TCP, with ‘samples flying back and forth’ (‘make it five per cent darker’); it sometimes taking ‘eight to ten versions’ to arrive at the right shade.

‘So they have almost a patina to them. For instance, this [Stratocaster] HSS strap here,’ continues Abbassi, pointing to another instrument, ‘is a Faded Black. It’s almost like a beautiful, blue-hued charcoal.’

‘Or an old T-shirt,’ chimes in Joey Brasler, VP of Product Management, with a grin. ‘That’s what it’s supposed to be.’ Explaining further, he says: ‘Justin’s the one that came up with the faded black. He ran to his office and came back with – literally – an old T-shirt. So we took pictures of it…’

‘I have a vintage black Clash T-shirt that I bought in Tokyo,’ says Norvell, sat at his desk in front of a Shepard Fairey stencil rendering of Joe Strummer, another previous Fender collaborator. ‘It’s the idea that a brand-new black T-shirt isn’t the same as a faded, worn one. It’s that aesthetic [that speaks to the fact that] so many of our instruments are heirlooms. They live for decades. People are still playing ones from the 1950s. A lot of your favourite artists are still playing the guitar they had forever. How do you imbue the age into something, but without necessarily really beating it up? So it was the idea of ageing these vintage colours… How can we reinterpret them… in a new way that is still aesthetically comfortable?’

All that vintaging? It’s about evoking serious use and serious love. These are not museum pieces, or art pieces. They’re certainly artful, but of fundamental importance is the guitars having both utility and a baked-in, respectful feel of heritage. As Norvell puts it: ‘The history of Fender is littered with cultural moments that are the soundtrack of people’s lives – whether that’s Buddy Holly on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles on the [Savile Row] rooftop, [The Clash’s] London Calling, or Hendrix playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock or lighting his guitar on fire [at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967].

‘This culture map of music is inexorably linked to Fender,’ the exec continues. ‘So harkening to the past in that aesthetic way makes a lot of sense – and puts you more in touch with that past. Things that are classic or vintage, we don’t view as necessarily just old. They’re the icons that are timeless, not just timely.’

That timeliness is working in other ways, too. After years when guitar music – whether hard rock, indie or pop-leaning – has felt moribund and, frankly, unfashionable, there’s a resurgence afoot.

That’s embodied in younger British artists such as this week’s Mercury Music Prize winner Sam (no relation) Fender and The Last Dinner Party, and in insurgent American acts such as Geese or Turnstile, the latter the Baltimore hardcore outfit who are fronting the American Pro Classic campaign. It’s embodied, too, in the widening appeal, outside the US, of country music – a sound that’s embodied by the Telecaster.

‘Country’s been huge,’ acknowledges Norvell, adding that that’s certainly been good for FMIC business. But he also cites ‘pop artists choosing to grab guitars, like Olivia Rodrigo’, plus artists who are ‘bubbling up – you can feel that there’s a groundswell occurring. There are small things, too – the shoegaze revival, nu-metal revival – [where] you can feel the guitar tide level is coming up. But also,’ he adds with a defiant, true-believer flourish, ‘it never went away.’

And of course, this is also the year of the world-wowing Oasis comeback tour. Post-Live ’25, does this music obsessive – who is, naturally, himself a guitarist, his own cherished instruments propped against the wall in his office – think we’ll see a generational bounce of new players? He nods.

‘[With] all of these bands that have dusted it off and come back out, the Gen X-ers are bringing the kids,’ Norvell says – an observable fact to which anyone who witnessed the enraptured, all-ages audiences at this summer’s Oasis shows around the world can attest. ‘But the kids have grown up on this stuff, too. And are inspired by it. It’s definitely something we’re hopeful of – and it feels like it’s happening. You can sense that the guitar is entering another cycle of relevance and coolness.’

The Fender American Professional Classic Series is available globally now. For more information, please visit Fender.com, @Fender