leo fender

Photo by John Dooley, courtesy of Songbirds

The scoop on the rarest of Fender solidbodies.

Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will have a look at the most weird and elusive Fender guitar ever: the Marauder. We will not only cover some really interesting technical details, but also its history.

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While many players today are familiar with G&L and their more famous models, like the ASAT, what some may not be aware of is G&L’s Custom Creations Department, developed in the late ‘90s to build limited edition instruments


G & L Custom Creations
What started with Leo continues to thrive today...

G&L is a company with rich ties to tradition. Founded by none other than George Fullerton and Leo Fender, G&L has started their own tradition by creating updated, modern interpretations of classic designs. This closely follows founder Leo Fender’s ethic of continuing improvement and refinement, never resting on laurels, and always striving to find a better way to do things.

While many players today are familiar with G&L and their more popular models, like the Legacy and iconic ASAT, what some may not be aware of is G&L’s Custom Creations Department, established in 1998 as a creative outlet for the company’s craftsmen to produce runs of special instruments. Premier Guitar recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dayv Chavez, Product Manager for G&L, for a talk about the Custom Creations Department, a bit about G&L’s history, and a few hints at what is in store.

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How did the Custom Creations Department get started?

The department was built with the idea of creating Limited Edition instruments with options that aren’t available on any of our other guitars. G&L has many talented and creative musicians, and there have always been animated discussions between them about how they’d like to customize a G&L. Sometimes the ideas are purely functional and tonal, and sometimes they involve a major cosmetic departure. We realized it would be fun and rewarding to enable our people to realize their dream G&Ls. Some CCD designs we build in one run and leave them be; with others we choose to leave the door open for a future run.

With the Limited Edition instruments, we do runs of them from time to time; we’ll do 100 at a time, and maybe a year later we’ll do another 100, maybe in a different fashion, not necessarily the same way. With the Special Build instruments, our builders are given the freedom to take the time to develop something that is a little more off the cuff than what we normally do.


G & L Custom Creations So the CCD doesn’t really have a custom shop aspect where someone could call and request one to be made?

No, and the reason for that is that we pretty much are a semi-custom shop – there’s a list of options where any of our dealers can call up and say, “I want this build, with this kind of neck, this kind of wood, and this kind of finish,” at no extra charge.

We haven’t ruled out the possibility of allowing customers to customize products through the CCD, but we are not a true, full-fledged custom shop. These days some companies call themselves, or some part of their operation, a “custom shop” but there is no clear definition of what “custom” means and consequently the term is abused. We strive to be authentic, so that’s why you don’t hear us calling ourselves a “custom shop.”


Have you ever had an order that came through that helped spawn an idea for a Special Build or Limited Edition?

There are so many orders that have had some influence on the CCD that it wouldn’t be fair to try to pick just one. However, one that comes to mind is our ASAT Classic BluesBoy. That actually came about by a dealer who requested that we build an ASAT with a humbucker, kind of in a Keith Richards style. It turned out to be such a success and many dealers started asking for it, so we ended up adding it to our normal roster.

Customers may also trigger some train of thought which germinates into a vision. Take our ASAT Special with the big Magnetic Field Design pickups. People new to the G&L scene have described this guitar as the “one with the P-90 pickups,” but despite a similar appearance, they’re not the same design. One of our guys thought it would be cool to build an ASAT Special with Gibson-esqe cues just to play on the visual similarity the big MFD pickups share with P-90s. The idea was an instant hit with our crew, so with some tinkering and chambering the body, our ASAT Junior was born.


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