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Now Fender is releasing a California-made acoustic guitar - its first production acoustic built in the United States in nearly 50 years.

The company on Tuesday launched the American Acoustasonic Series Telecaster, which will sell for about $2,000 and be manufactured at the company’s Corona, California factory.

Fender already sells acoustic guitars, but they are made overseas at lower prices and are aimed at beginners and intermediate players. It has not made acoustics in California since a limited run in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Fender will be competing against California-based Taylor Guitars and Pennsylvania-based C.F. Martin & Co.

More: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fender-musical-guitars/electric-guitar-maker-fender-launches-u-s-made-acoustic-guitar-idUSKCN1PG1N9?il=0

The new Fender American Acoustasonic Series Telecaster is a hybrid design, part acoustic and certainly inspired by a certain classic ’50s Californian classic electric guitar design. The guitar also features a mahogany Telecaster neck with an ebony fingerboard. So, expect the playing experience to be not too dissimilar to playing a regular electric.

It is still a bolt-on neck design and has a nice contoured heel, so playing should feel like familiar ground for most electric players.

https://www.gearnews.com/namm-2019-fender-american-acoustasonic-series-telecaster/

With its round sound hole and naturally resonant body, the Acoustasonic plays and sounds like an acoustic guitar. But inside the instrument is an array of electronics that lets the player dial in a wide variety of sounds; when amplified, the Acoustasonic can take on the tonal character of different styles of acoustic guitar as well as solid-body and hollow-body electrics.

You can see one pickup positioned next to the bridge in the image above. Hidden inside the body is a three-piece system designed by Fender with the folks at Fishman, a company famous for its acoustic guitar pickups. (A 20-hour battery, which you charge via a USB port next to the cable jack, powers the pickups.) The Acoustasonic also has two wooden knobs and a selector switch. On a normal Telecaster, the selector switch would allow the player to swap between pickups, turning one on and the other off. But on the Acoustasonic, that switch lets you scroll through a series of digitally modeled tones that mimic different guitar types.

https://www.wired.com/story/fender-american-acoustasonic-telecaster/

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