GGJaguar
Reverential Member
Today’s NGD is non-Guild related, but it is still a “G” brand guitar. Since it’s not a Guild, I’d normally just show a pic with my impressions of it, but the backstory is interesting if you like history and the creative mind of Leo Fender. As a capstone to my “40 years of G&L” collection, I acquired their newest model called the Espada. In a nutshell, there was a concept guitar sitting in Leo Fender’s office at the G&L factory that he designed around 1968 while he was under contract with CBS Musical Instruments. I was fortunate enough to inspect it when I was at the G&L factory back in 1998 so I’m familiar with it.
Fast forward to 2018 when the current owners of G&L found a drawing for the prototype of the concept guitar. It shows the hum cancelling split-coil pickups and bizzaro bridge as on the concept guitar, but with a fancier control plate.
G&L President Dave McLaren thought it would be cool to use the concept guitar and drawing as the basis for a new G&L that incorporated Leo’s later technology rather than that of the late 1960s. This meant Magnetic Field Design (MFD) pickups instead of alnico rod pickups and a preamp similar to Leo’s preamps of the 1980s that were better suited to the MFDs. In addition, instead of using the strange prototype bridge (and believe me it’s a real Rube Goldberg thing), a G&L Saddle-Lock bridge would be used. The concept guitar and drawing did not specify a neck (the neck used was a Fender Coronado-ish thing), so Dave dug through the G&L archives and found a drawing and template for an early style guitar neck that was never used on a production guitar. Here's the G&L prototype next to Leo's concept guitar.
After some tweaking (change from alder to ash, dot to block inlays), the final result was the Espada that was introduced at the 2019 Winter NAMM show. The name means “sword” in Spanish and was inspired by the control plate that, to Dave McLaren, looked like a sword. Here's Dave with the first two (pre-production) Espadas at NAMM.
The 2019 models were either sunburst or natural ash. Two new colors were added for 2020: Sonic Blue and Clear Orange and I was lucky to get a good deal on an orange one that has a flame maple neck to boot! Would Leo have re-designed his original idea in this way? Knowing Leo’s G&L work very well, I’d say yes, I think he would have come very close to this design. Overall, it’s a typical G&L – Fendery neck profile and a sound that’s bright and aggressive. The switchery and preamp is totally 1980s Leo, too. It’s all very familiar feeling for a vintage G&L nut like me. The only nit to pick is that, IMHO, the block inlays demand that the fingerboard be bound. It looks unfinished to me without it, but I’ll survive because I have plenty of Guilds with bound fingerboards.
Fast forward to 2018 when the current owners of G&L found a drawing for the prototype of the concept guitar. It shows the hum cancelling split-coil pickups and bizzaro bridge as on the concept guitar, but with a fancier control plate.
G&L President Dave McLaren thought it would be cool to use the concept guitar and drawing as the basis for a new G&L that incorporated Leo’s later technology rather than that of the late 1960s. This meant Magnetic Field Design (MFD) pickups instead of alnico rod pickups and a preamp similar to Leo’s preamps of the 1980s that were better suited to the MFDs. In addition, instead of using the strange prototype bridge (and believe me it’s a real Rube Goldberg thing), a G&L Saddle-Lock bridge would be used. The concept guitar and drawing did not specify a neck (the neck used was a Fender Coronado-ish thing), so Dave dug through the G&L archives and found a drawing and template for an early style guitar neck that was never used on a production guitar. Here's the G&L prototype next to Leo's concept guitar.
After some tweaking (change from alder to ash, dot to block inlays), the final result was the Espada that was introduced at the 2019 Winter NAMM show. The name means “sword” in Spanish and was inspired by the control plate that, to Dave McLaren, looked like a sword. Here's Dave with the first two (pre-production) Espadas at NAMM.
The 2019 models were either sunburst or natural ash. Two new colors were added for 2020: Sonic Blue and Clear Orange and I was lucky to get a good deal on an orange one that has a flame maple neck to boot! Would Leo have re-designed his original idea in this way? Knowing Leo’s G&L work very well, I’d say yes, I think he would have come very close to this design. Overall, it’s a typical G&L – Fendery neck profile and a sound that’s bright and aggressive. The switchery and preamp is totally 1980s Leo, too. It’s all very familiar feeling for a vintage G&L nut like me. The only nit to pick is that, IMHO, the block inlays demand that the fingerboard be bound. It looks unfinished to me without it, but I’ll survive because I have plenty of Guilds with bound fingerboards.
