Fender American Vintage ’64 Telecaster

The American Vintage series introduces an all-new lineup of original-era model year guitars that bring Fender history and heritage to authentic and exciting new life. With key features and pivotal design elements spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, new American Vintage series instruments delve deep into Fender’s roots—expertly preserving an innovative U.S. guitar-making legacy and vividly demonstrating like never before that Fender not only knows where it’s going, but also remembers where it came from.

The American Vintage Series has long presented some of Fender’s best selling guitars (their early-’80s introduction, in fact, was one of the first signs that Fender was “back” as the CBS era ended). Today, Fender has boldly cleared the slate to make way for a fresh American Vintage series with new features, new specs and the most meticulous level of vintage accuracy yet. Rather than just replacing the previous models with different ones, we’ve completely and comprehensively re-imagined the entire vintage-reissue concept—restoring original tooling dies, voicing new pickups, reformulating vintage colors and more—based on actual vintage guitars we tracked down to make sure we had it right. We did the work, and it shows, because there’s pure tonal magic in each new American Vintage instrument.

1964 was a monumental year for popular music and a pivotal year for the Telecaster® guitar, too, as seen in the American Vintage ’64 Telecaster. The thicker maple necks of the ’50s and early ’60s now gave way to a more rounded “C”-shaped profile, this time topped with a round-laminated rosewood fingerboard with larger pearl dot inlays. Other vintage-accurate touches include a lightweight alder body (ash on White Blonde model), staggered bridge pickup pole magnets, threaded steel “barrel” bridge saddles, three-ply white pickguard with eight holes, top-hat switch tip, flat-top knurled chrome control knobs and more.

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