not to sure but....

[poiter]

i saw this on ebay, and was wondering did musicman make 6 strings in the 70's, i was under the impression they were only doing basses???

eBay Australia: Musicman Stringray 1 Electric Guitar 1976 (Leo Fender) (item 250107028356, end time 28-Apr-07 12:10:09 AEST)

 

[andynpeters]

They did, it looks legit. Not many of them about though. There are Stingrays and Sabres and they look a lot like the early G&Ls. Think they also made a Cutlass model but I'm not sure. No doubt a Google search would turn up more info if you're interested.

 

[GWDavis28]

The Stingray guitar is pre-Ernie Ball. It's when Leo Fender was designing guitars for Music man I do beleive.

Glenn |B)

 

[John C]

I'll pile on - yep, Glenn is correct; that would be a Leo Fender era MusicMan. They did make both a Stingray and a Sabre guitar models in the 1970s as andynpeters says.

One factoid about these I've found from reading a couple of books on Fender (Forrest White's book, George Fullerton's first book, and Richard Smith's book on Fender) is that while Leo Fender was one of 3 principles in the original MusicMan company, he also owned another company called "CLF Research". Techincally, CLF Research built the guitars and basses, sold them to MusicMan who in turn sold them to the dealers. MusicMan did own the factory that built the amps.

When Leo had a falling out with his partners (White and Tom Walker), he founded G&L Guitars as a company but used his CLF Research facility and employees to build the G&Ls. I believe for a while circa 1980 CLF Research was building both G&L and MusicMan models. I've heard a lot of "he said/she said" type stories about why CLF Research quit building MusicMans, but after some point Fender mothballed the "CLF Research" company and only operated the facility as G&L after the contract with MusicMan was terminated.

The early G&L models, particularly the F-100, are essentially the "next evolution" of where Leo was going with the two MusicMan models.

 

[andynpeters]

Owned an f-100 briefly a couple of years back (apparently a very rare lefty)....actually not a million miles away from the JP design.