Fender American Vintage ’52 Telecaster – Butterscotch Blonde Fender

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.

Nowhere is this re-dedication to detail more evident than on the American Vintage ’52 Telecaster, which returns to the fold with body, neck and pickups refined with the best features (tones, curves, perimeters, radii and more) from a handful of extraordinary ’52 Tele specimens we examined. Premium features include an ash body with a singe-ply black pickguard and thin nitrocellulose lacquer finish in lighter Butterscotch Blonde, deep maple neck with “U”-shaped profile and generously rolled edges, sculpted headstock volute for even more first-position comfort, long-lost recessed-top “barrel” switch tip, vintage tuner spacing for truly straight string pull over the bone nut, vintage-style bridge with three brass saddles, and knurled chrome domed control knobs.