Ugly Guitar Thread

[pablopepper]

Ugh. Not a redeeming feature to be found.

[FrankenWashie]

It must be the week for it. Ladeeez aaan gennlemen, I give you the unmitigated horror that is the Fender Performer bass.

I kinda like the body shape, but the headstock? A definite 7.5 on the yuckometer.

[wokkaboy]

unusual for Fender to produce an ugly axe but have to agree it belongs in this thread

[dave.king1]

unusual for Fender to produce an ugly axe but have to agree it belongs in this thread

A quick google showed it on a display with a Fender CoA so that is just weird

[Simon Barden]

Presumably an '80s bass? "OK, we'll give it a heavy metal body, but then we'll use up some stuff left over from the mid '60s and paint it to match".

[Simon Barden]

There was also a Performer guitar.



Apparently they were made in Japan from '85-'86 at the time in the '80s when Fender had been sold to FMIC from CBS and had no US manufacturing facilities, and both the bass and guitar were supposedly produced from leftover scrap wood from Japanese manufactured Fender Stratocasters.

Both guitar and bass had the micro-tilt neck, and as a result, only light gauge strings were recommended for the bass.

[Simon Barden]

The guitar (at least - not sure about the bass) also had a stacked 250k + 1M tone pot with a centre detent, so possibly the first appearance of the TBX tone control, though not marketed as such.

[Bass Guy]

Wise words from John Page, the designer of the Performer Bass and leading light of Fender's Custom Shop.

"Yes the Performer was one of my designs. Believe it or not, the Performer bass (designed before the guitar) was designed to be the Elite version of the*Jazz Bass... yes that's right... it was going to be the top version of the Jazz Bass... scary huh? The shape of the instrument is derivative of the back of the Strat. Look at the waist cut on the back of the Strat and you'll see where the basic horn/body shape started. At the time (1982-3ish?) I was designing this, Fender was considered a pretty conservative instrument.*Kramer,*BC Rich*and Jackson*were building these radically styled instruments, so we wanted to get into that market. In my original design, it used a Strat-style peghead and the pickups were a double Strat humbucking setup. I also designed the*Fender logo on the Performer... I can't say that that['s] a good thing, but it was kinda cool to design a new Fender logo. We got some comments that it looked like the Peavey*logo, which really pissed me off.

The guitar that was produced was different than the original that I designed. I initially designed it to be made in the US, but it ended up being made in Japan. When that transition happened, things were changed. The peghead went from the Strat to the Swinger, for example, so I don't remember what pickup they actually went with. I angled the pickups to thicken up the top end a bit... and it looked cool. Well, at least to me, I like "off-line aesthetics". Why weren't they successful? Look, I was a designer in Fender R&D for years before I started the CS. I was always trying to design something new and different. When we started the CS, I tried to do the same. Reality is, the public wants Strats, Teles, P & J basses from Fender. So it's really tough to get them to accept any "new & different" designs in any great quantities. I'm afraid I have no idea how many were actually produced.

I designed the five string version when I first came back to start the CS in '87. To the best of my knowledge there was only one prototype made by*Fuji Gen Gakki. It was kind of a pinkish color and had the same basic features of the 4 string Japanese model. When I initially designed both basses, the [pickups] were modified Mustang coils, wound beefier and wired to be humbucking. When the four string version was released it used a single coil p/u under each cover. The original also was designed with an angular/massive/fine-tuning bridge, and a "lightning bolt" styled string tree. Both were prototyped but never released. I never heard of any instruments being destroyed for any legal issues... maybe another one of those "legends"? The idea behind the neck was simple, at the time a lot of bass players were guitar player converts. Bass playing style started to have more of a "lead guitar" approach, so the idea of a narrower neck was to help along those lines. The original proto[type] went on the summer before it was released with the then "hottest" bands, Billy Idol (I don't remember his bass player's name) and The CARS bass player, Ben Orr."

[Fretworn]

I kinda like the body shape, but the headstock? A definite 7.5 on the yuckometer.

I was just about to type the same thing.

[dave.king1]

Didn't watch the review vid but Scott Grove is an "interesting" person, had a bit of correspondence with him when he was on TDPRI