Today I was on the Fender website and accidentally found a nice little tool there: the online guitar tuner.

When you click on one of the six tuners of the peghead, the software will play a sample of the corresponding note, played with a clean Fender sound.

There are some very useful options: loop on or off (the note will be played again and again in loop mode), and you can select the tuning - standard or all different kinds of open or special tunings. You can even create your own tuning.

The only thing that is missing is the option to fine tune to another root pitch than 440Hz – but to be honest, not something many of us really need.

I like the idea to tune the guitar using your ears instead of a tuner device – helps to keep your ears fit

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I often read threads in forums about how to check if a certain part on a Fender vintage guitar is original or not. Of course there are countless books and websites which show many details that help to do so. However, there is one particular detail which is only rarely mentioned: the ‘dowel holes‘ on those old Fender bodies (I am not talking about ‘nail holes’ here!)

Dowel holes

If I understand it right, Fender used some clamps to hold the wood plank when sawing out the body. These clamps left two holes in the body which were filled with wooden dowels. These dowel holes are at exactly the same location on all old Stratocaster bodies – in fact all other models seem to have them as well, however, at completely different places than the Strat.

So if you happen to see an old stripped Fender body, you can easily spot these. New Fender and all the reissue bodies don’t have them. Thus this seems to be a reliable detail to tell an old body from a fake.

Unfortunately, you normally can’t see them on a painted body, at least not easily. However, if you know exactly where they are and observe carefully the way the body reflects light at these places, you might see them through the finish. This is because old nitro finish is often really thin and the dowel holes leave a tiny inaccuracy in the body surface. And of course there are all those Stevie Ray Vaughn or Rory Gallagher-like looking battered Strats which are partly bare of any finish and allow to see those dowel holes directly.

I am not sure in which year these disappappeared, I somewhere in the 70ies, when Fender switched to a different method of sawing out the bodies.

Theoretically  it is possible to fake these holes, too, but I think this is rarely done – yet …

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As many of you might already have noticed, I recently added a forum to this site.

We have the comment function below each blog post which has been used to discuss everything that is related to the post subject, but many times completely new threads emerged within the comments which became easily off-topic in a way. For this reason – and to make it possible for readers to start a new thread any time – I added a proper forum. The forum plug-in I found for this purpose is really great and offers a lot of cool functions. Almost every feature you know of other forums is here, too (like directly embedding youtube videos or pictures, PM’ing other members, and so on.

You can get to the forum via the link under ‘Pages’ at the top of the left sidebar. And there is a list of the latest forum posts a bit below in the sidebar, you can also get to the forum by clicking on one of the list entries.

You need to register to post but don’t be afraid, you will not be pestered with many newsletters or such. This is mainly to avoid spammers.

So after the last few days of testing I officially announce the new forum with this post. I hope there will be many interesting discussions, looking forward to it

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Mark Knopfler’s “Sultans” Strat (ser.-no. #68354) is from 1961. The second red Fender Strat he played with Dire Straits (ser.no #80470) was from about the same period (apart from the question in how far it was original Fender at all). For this reason I put together a table to give you a survey about the distinctive features that are different on a 1961 Strat compared  with earlier or later Strats.

	1961 Strat	before	later
Body wood	alder (ash for models in blonde)	light ash (swamp ash) until 1956	heavy ash in the 70ies
Fingerboard	slab board made of Brazilian rosewood	one-piece maple nack until 1959	curved rosewood venue from mid 1962 on, optional maple board in the late 60ies, one-piece maply neck available in the 70ies again
Pick-ups	staggered pole-pieces, formvar wire insulation, magnetic northpole on top	magnetic southpole on top in the early 50ies	enamel wire insulation from about mid 1964 on, flush polepieces from 1974 on
Pickguard	three layers (white/black/white) pickguard of celluloid, fixed with 11 screws, screw #3 between middle and neck pick-up	one layer plastic pickguard (or bakelite before 1957) until 1959, fixed with 8 screws (a few models with three layers and 8 screws in 1959)	screw #3 moved to middle pick-up in 1963, three layers plastic pickguard from 1965 on
Bridge	6 individual bridge saddles made of bent steel, separate steel tremolo block,	same	no separated tremolo block from 19xx on, diecasted bridge saddles,
Laquer	thin nitro laquer, standard was three tone sunburst (yellow/red/black), many custom colours available	thin nitro laquer, standard was two tone sunburst (yellow/black) until 1958, only a few (and rare) custom colours available	glossy polyesther finish from 1968 on
Tuners	made by Kluson, stamped with one line with “Kluson deluxe”	same	stamped with two lines with “Kluson deluxe” from 1964 on, made by Schaller from 1968 on
Pick-up switch	3-way	3-way	5-way from 1977 on
Body contours	deeply contoured - individual differences due to hand work	deeply contoured - individual differences due to hand work	becoming less contoured from the mid 60ies on
Stratocaster decal	gold “spaghetti logo” with two patent numbers	gold “spaghetti logo”, no patent numbers until 1960,	In late 1964 Fender changed to the fatter gold transitional logo,black logo from 1968 on three patent number 1963-1964, later 4 numbers
Peghead size	small	small	big head from 1966 on
String holders	one butterfly string holder	one round holder until 1956	two string holders from 1974 on
Number plate / neck fixation	4 screw number plate with stamped serial number	same (1954 models sometimes with serial number on tremolo plate)	stamped with big F from 1966on, three hole number plate from 1972 on
Serial numbers	5 digits, ca. 50 – 80,000 range	lower numbers	higher, starting with the letter L from 1964 on, 6 digits from 1965 on

Detail pictures

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Related articles

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• Amps and Gear on the Dire Straits Bootleg Leeds 1978
• Early Dire Straits: Which of the two red Fenders was used in which concert?
• Nice: Fender online guitar tuner
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Everyone who has seen Mark Knopfler live on one of his recent tours might have notived that cool-looking turquoise combo amp next to Knopfler’s Marshall cabinets. Knopfler’s second guitarist Richard Bennet also plays one. It is the Tone King Imperial.

Tone King amps are built from selected quality parts by Mark Bartel in Baltimore. Mark does all the woodworking, upholstery, and electronics assembly himself to have total control about the sound and quality of his products.

The Imperial is a two-channel combo with reverb and tremolo. The output power is about 20 watts, coming from two 6V6 tubes. The two channel make use of 12AX7 pre-amp tube, and one 12AT7 driving the reverb, just like Fender amps from the sixties or seventies. In fact it reminds me a lot of a black-face Fender Deluxe amp, which also has a similar layout and one 12″ speaker. In fact you can read on the Tone King website that the rhythm channel aims for that Fender black-face sound. A volume, treble and bass control is all that is required here. Of course the spring reverb – a fundamental ingredient of the Fender sound – works for both channels (note that on Fender amps it only affects the second channel). It will not surprise you that the reverb circuit uses the same two-spring reverb tank  (acutronics) and the same tubes like Fender.

The second channel also features just three controls: volume, tone and mid-bite – so no bass and treble control here, just on a small Fender tweed amp from the 50ies. The mid-bite adds a midrange peak and tightens the low end, controling the overdrive tone character that can be blended from Fender tweed to Marshall style.

The speaker is custom designed and labelled with ‘Tone King 33′ – manufactured by Eminence (who also built the speakers in most silver-face Fender amps in the 70ies and 80ies).

The recommended retail price for the Tone King Imperial is 1995 USD. More infos on toneking.com.

On the last (2008) tour Mark Knopfler played his red Schecter Telecaster on the song Cannibals through the Tone King Imperial, his ‘54 Stratocaster  on the song Our Shangri-La, and his signature MK Strat on Postcards from Paraguay and  True love will never fade. I guess it is the ‘king of clean’ for him and that he hardly ever uses the second channel. Another song to feature this fine amp is Hard Shoulder from Get Lucky (played on a Gretch 6120).

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