“A lot of people say, ‘I can drag a guitar behind my car and then sell it for that price.’ It’s like, ‘OK, go do it then!” In the court of the Master Builders – Fender’s Custom Shop gurus spill the secrets of their trade

Fender’s Custom Shop is the home of the company’s dream machines, which are built to the highest quality the California-based company can offer.

But there are tiers within tiers even at this level, and the Custom Shop’s Masterbuilt instruments offer the closest any large guitar maker can get to the hand-craft of master luthiers, with a small cadre of highly experienced Fender guitar makers personally crafting dream guitars from headstock to end-pin.

Recently, we were lucky enough to sit down for a chat with two of Fender’s most in-demand Master Builders, Austin MacNutt and Andy Hicks.

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Who better to ask about the sonic soul of Leo Fender’s classic designs and the best ways to mod and maintain them for maximum performance – and also give their views on the way ahead for aged guitars, trends in custom guitar making at Fender and more…

It’s the 75th anniversary of the Telecaster – so tell us, what’s your best setup tip for the classic Tele?

Austin MacNutt: If you’re dealing with a vintage three-barrel saddle kind of thing, that’s the first big thing that comes to mind. If you don’t have compensated saddles, you’re just kind of splitting the difference [in terms of intonation] – that’s all you can do.

So one’s going to be a hair sharp, one’s gonna be a hair flat on each of those saddles. But if that’s not what you want to do, you can get the compensated saddles and then you’re off to the races.

On Fender’s recent American Ultra Luxe Vintage ’50s Tele, we notice they used six individual block-style saddles but made them of brass, presumably to keep that classic Tele twang while offering more accurate intonation – do you think that style of bridge can offer the best of both worlds?

Austin: I haven’t been hands-on with that particular [type of bridge and saddle] myself yet, but from what I can see it’s a great setup – because you still get the brass and you know it’s still got that vintage DNA but just brought into the modern world a little bit.

How about Fender electrics with a vibrato – especially the Strat? How do you avoid niggling issues with the guitar not returning to tuning when you use the vibrato a lot?

Andy Hicks: All the setups are going to start, for me, with making sure that your fret dressing is done properly. Because if you’re having to fight that, then you’re going to run into issues through a lot of your setup.

There are different kinds of nut files – there are ones that have a flat, squared-off bottom, and then there are ones that have a curved bottom that more [closely] replicate the shape of a string. And that’s what I like. It allows them to smoothly roll through the nut and return to the position that they want to be in.

Also, when I cut the slot, I don’t oversize it, but I do roll the file a little bit as I’m doing it – to remove any burrs, anything that could catch one of the winds on one of the strings. I’ll also be making sure that all the strings are stretched properly and that there are no burrs on the saddles at the bridge as well.

So many issues can be solved by just taking some small file and, without much pressure, dragging it across the surfaces where the strings are going to be – because you’re catching these little metal fragments that bind the strings. What is causing the tuning issue is the string is being stretched or loosened, but then it’s not returning to its original tension.

How do you tend to tailor the break angle over the nut to optimise tuning stability?

Andy: I’m pretty careful about cutting my nut slots so that the angle is going to be the natural angle of the string from the break point to where it’s meeting on the tuning key. If you’re slotting too steep of an angle, then you’re going to have a sharp point that the string is resting on again, and that’s going to be a binding point.

If it’s not steep enough, then you’re going to have this area where it can slide and not really have a meeting point. So it takes a little bit of practice, but once you can really nail that angle, that also is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for making sure that you’re not having tuning issues.

Austin: It doesn’t matter if it’s staggered tuners or traditional tuners with a string tree; that angle needs to just match the natural path of the string.

It’s surprising what quite subtle tweaks can do to optimise the overall performance of the guitar.

Austin: Yeah. I do some setup work for session players out in LA and they’re always surprised that they’ll bring an instrument over and I’ll immediately know what the issue is. It’s just a case of one swipe of a file, and they’re like, ‘That’s it?’ And I’m like ‘Yeah.’

And they say, ‘I could have done that.’ But [you couldn’t really fix it that quickly] unless you do this stuff enough to the point that it becomes second nature to you – and you can just hear or feel the problem and know pretty immediately what’s going on.

How about classic offset guitars like the Jazzmaster – anything you take extra care over in terms of setup for those?

Austin: I think the first thing I would try to tell somebody who has a vintage Jazzmaster bridge and the tremolo that goes with that is, just understand what it is and what the pros of that are – and also that it wasn’t a perfect design. It’s still being fiddled with today.

So, you know, there’s not really an answer for everybody’s playing style. But one of the things that I’ve found – and we do this [as a matter of course] in the Custom Shop – is that when you take the bridge out, you want to make sure that all the components fit properly.

It’s all metal pieces that are acting on a pivot, and they can create these little burrs and bends. For example, sometimes, I’m taking the bridge off and filing the bottom of the screw for the height adjustment. And just doing that a little bit can help with the tuning stability on the Jazzmaster.

And I know this is not really what you’re asking, but if you’re talking about Custom Shop instruments – specifically Masterbuilt ones – the person who’s assembling the bridge is also the person who’s going to be setting the guitar up later and doing things to the components before they even assemble the bridge. When I’m undertaking that kind of work, I know what could potentially be an issue later. So it’s just an experience thing.

How do you think what the Custom Shop offers to players has evolved over the past 20 years?

Andy: Obviously, it originated as just strictly recreating examples of true vintage instruments, which we are still doing today. But then there are also [models we make] that are a little bit extra or that have weird colour combinations, stuff that is not vintage-correct…

Austin: Things that live in the world of fantasy a little bit.

Andy: Yeah, so it’s expanded to that and that opens up a lot of opportunities for really cool-looking instruments – you can really have a lot of fun getting some extravagant relicing or weird colours going. So it started from trying to recreate vintage stuff, which we still do, but now it’s become its own thing, too.

I think also there’s always this thought of like, ‘Will the relic fad go away?’ And I don’t think it will. When you’re ordering that kind of instrument, it is – by its nature and how we do the work on it – a one-of-one instrument. So if you’re getting a NOS [New Old Stock finish – namely, pristine and unaged] Candy Apple Red Strat, then you’re going to see other Strats out in the wild that look like your Strat.

But if you’re having any level of relicing done on it, you can always pick yours out from the crowd. And I think for customers, especially if they’re spending that kind of money on an instrument, it’s like, ‘My guitar is now one-of-one, just because it has this unique [artificial ageing] fingerprint on it that doesn’t exist on any other guitar.’

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It’s like relicing has become a kind of aesthetic all of its own that goes beyond simply trying to make guitars look authentically old.

Andy: Yeah, I mean, there are still people who want an instrument that looks like it’s straight out of the early ’50s, and then there are other people who see [relicing] just as another aesthetic part of the guitar. In just the same way as people have got their favourite colours, they also tend to have their favourite relicing level.

And it’s not about, ‘Does it look like it actually happened to the instrument?’ Something that you’ll hear a lot of is that relicing is like ‘stolen valour’ – like, ‘Oh, you didn’t earn that relicing.’ But I think people who like it are not thinking of it like that.

They’re not thinking, ‘I want this instrument to look like I’ve played it for 60 years.’ They just think it’s cool. And I don’t gatekeep that kind of [choice] because it’s your instrument – and whatever makes you feel like you want to pick it up and play it, that’s what you should do.”

Austin: I always tell people there’s nothing stopping you from ordering a NOS [non-relic] guitar. I’m more than happy to not beat it up [laughs] – so you can have both.

As time goes by and children of the 1990s enter the market for high-end Fenders, do you notice an increase in shred-inspired orders in the Custom Shop?

Andy: I would say that’s a pretty accurate assessment. I’ve done some more Floyd Rose stuff recently than I have in the past, for sure – there’s definitely more of that.

Austin: We’re entering the era where the guys who grew up listening to Eddie Van Halen, they’re the customer base now who are buying Custom Shop, and they’re not looking for their dad’s guitar. They’re looking for their guitar hero’s guitar. So I know that a big part of my clientele is our customers who want those ‘Super Strats’ and I probably do more Floyd Rose HSS than anybody else in the shop.

It’s not surprising to me at all because guys who are my age and slightly older, I know that those are the instruments they grew up listening to: their dads grew up listening to stock ‘Blackguards’ and vintage Strats, and their heroes are screaming on high-performance instruments.

What other interesting new avenues do you think Custom Shop guitars can go down?

Austin: Well, there’s no shortage of interesting requests and it’s fun to fulfil someone’s dream guitar. They might be the only one that has that idea or that specific group of specs on the guitar – so it’s always something new.

Andy: But there’s a balance you have to do with Fender because, at some point, if you take too much away from what makes it a Fender, it’s losing some of that soul. And Leo created these incredible instruments – and when I talk about Leo Fender and his early instruments, I compare him to somebody who invented the game of baseball, and then his very first turn at bat, hit a home run. He did it so well that even now, 70 years later, everybody still wants to have their version of the Strat and the Tele.

And so [you ask yourself], ‘Am I at some point going to take away so many parts of the soul of the instrument that now it’s no longer a Strat?’ And if I’ve done that, I’m probably not doing my job correctly. There are other brands under the Fender umbrella that maybe have the freedom to do that, but I try to always strike a balance with it.

It seems like more and more guitar makers are now offering some form of aged finish for their instruments – obviously inspired by the Relic trend that Fender started. Does that increasing competition influence what you do to any degree?

Andy: For me, I’m just so proud of the quality of work that all of the Master Builders are putting out, and the rest of Custom Shop, that I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about who else is chasing that look. If somebody else wants to try to do it and it benefits them, then great.

But I’m not too worried about what somebody else is doing. I’m focused on my own builds and making sure that there’s a certain standard of quality that goes out. Everybody’s free to try it. It’s not as easy as they think. A lot of people say, ‘I can drag a guitar behind my car and then sell it for that price,’ and it’s like, ‘Okay, go do it then! [Laughs]’

• For more info on Andy and Austin’s incredible work, head over to the Fender Custom Shop
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.