Fender Katana

The Fender Katana is a type of electric guitar built by the Fender company. It was designed by marketing director Dan Smith in 1985. The Katana is by far the most unorthodox guitar ever made by Fender. The Katana was designed to compete with the wild shaped guitars of era such as the Gibson Flying V and satisfy Fender dealers who were feeling the pinch by them. Sadly, the Katana did not sell as well as was hoped and it was discontinued in 1986, just a year later.

It has a maple glued-in neck with bound rosewood fingerboard, offset triangle markers, a 629mm (24.75") scale with 22 frets, a truss rod adjuster at the headstock end. It features a string clamp, an arrow-head-shape headstock and a neck that matches the body colour. The guitar has two coverless humbucker pickups, two controls (volume, tone) and a three-way selector , all on body, and a side mounted jack socket. It also has a two-pivot bridge/vibrato unit.

The strange Katana body style was copied for the much cheaper Squier Katana, which had only one pickup, a bolt-on short scale neck and basic volume/tone controls. The Squier version is much more commonly available in the used market than the genuine Fender model.

External links

[http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rexrobards.com/riqueriquardo/images/b122800.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.rexrobards.com/riqueriquardo/b122800.html&h=333&w=218&sz=10&hl=en&start=11&tbnid=rkIsh6QOuWucgM:&tbnh=119&tbnw=78&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfender%2Bkatana%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den] - Page about Fender Guitars with Katana picture and information.