This week’s podcast very quickly descended into one of those “has one of the biggest guitar makers in the industry completely lost its mind” episodes.
The main story was Fender apparently going absolutely scorched earth with cease and desist letters following their recent German court win over Strat-style guitars.
And honestly, the whole thing feels like watching a car crash in slow motion - painful and inevitable.
The conversation started with Fender’s court case in Germany against a company making Strat-style instruments. Apparently Fender won by default, and now there are rumours flying around that companies ranging from boutique builders all the way up to companies like Thomann and Harley Benton have potentially been hit with legal threats over S-style guitars (no official news, so this is speculation at this point).
Which immediately triggered the age-old guitar community argument:
At what point does a guitar shape stop belonging to one company and just become part of music culture?
Because whether Fender likes it or not, the Strat shape is basically the electric guitar silhouette.
Even people who know absolutely nothing about guitars would probably draw one if you asked them what a guitar looked like.
That’s partly why the whole thing has rubbed so many players the wrong way.
Especially because guitar companies have spent decades carefully avoiding Fender trademarks already.
We all know that S-style is shorthand for a Strat type guitar, much like a T-style is a tele or a "single cut" usually means a LP shape.
The entire industry basically developed its own legal safe-word vocabulary years ago.
One of the funniest parts of the discussion was diving back into the old “lawsuit guitar” era from the 70s, where Japanese brands like Ibanez ended up making instruments that are now weirdly collectible because they got too close to Gibson and Fender designs.
Which somehow led us onto headstocks.
Because guitarists will always eventually end up talking about headstocks.
There was genuine appreciation for Schecter managing to basically reverse the Gibson open-book headstock shape and somehow get away with it.
A sort of subtle legal trolling.
Like the guitar equivalent of copying somebody’s homework but changing enough words so the teacher can’t prove it.
The overall feeling though was that Fender’s current approach just feels… bad.
Not “another overpriced signature model” bad.
Actual morale-killing bad.
The sort of thing that makes the industry feel smaller and less creative.
Particularly when smaller builders are the ones potentially getting caught in the blast radius.
For the rest of the conversation, check out the episode over on YouTube at www.youtube.com/@frettalkpodcast
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