The Fender Bullet was an electric guitar originally designed by John Page and manufactured and marketed by the

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation The Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (FMIC, or simply Fender) is an American manufacturer and marketer of musical instruments and amplifiers. Fender produces acoustic guitars, bass amplifiers and public address equipment; however, it is b ...

. It was first introduced as a line of "student" guitars to replace the outgoing

Mustang The mustang is a free-roaming horse of the Western United States, descended from horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors. Mustangs are often referred to as wild horses, but because they are descended from once-domesticate ...

and Musicmaster models.

History

Fender initially marketed two models, the "Bullet" and the "Bullet Deluxe," both manufactured in the United States. These models had a single cutaway body style similar to that of the

Fender Telecaster The Fender Telecaster, colloquially known as the Tele (), is an electric guitar produced by Fender (company), Fender. Together with its sister model the Fender Esquire, Esquire, it was the world's first mass-produced, commercially successfulLes ...

, but were much smaller—closer in size to the Mustang and Duo-Sonic that the Bullet replaced. They had a 21-fret rosewood neck, Telecaster-style

headstock A headstock or peghead is part of a guitar or similar stringed instruments such as a lute, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and others of the lute lineage. The main function of a headstock is to house the tuning pegs or other mechanism that holds the s ...

, and Kluson Deluxe tuners. The Bullet Deluxe had a plastic pickguard with a separate, traditional hardtail bridge while the standard model featured a steel pickguard-bridge-tailpiece combo. Both models had two single coil pickups with a three-way selector switch. In 1982, Fender introduced a revised version of the Bullet, including two bass models. This series featured a double cutaway body similar but much smaller than the

Fender Stratocaster The Fender Stratocaster, colloquially known as the Strat, is a model of double- cutaway electric guitar designed between 1952 and 1954 by Leo Fender, Bill Carson, George Fullerton, and Freddie Tavares. The Fender Musical Instruments Corpora ...

without body contouring and therefore almost the same shape as the Mustang and Duo-Sonic that the Bullet replaced. The S-2 was notably featured in the music video for

Twisted Sister Twisted Sister was an American Heavy metal music, heavy metal band formed in 1972 in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, and later based on Long Island, New York (state), New York. Their best-known songs include "We're Not Gonna Take It (Twisted Sister song ...

's " We're Not Gonna Take It," used by the son of Mark Metcalf's character to blow him out of the window when the song begins. Fender ceased production of Bullet guitars at the end of 1983, and the model was never produced again in the USA. Production of the Bullet range moved to Japan, under the Squier name, and then Korea. Squier introduced a new, Chinese-made Bullet Strat in 2005. Squier by Fender

By 2015, Fender was using the Squier Bullet name as a line of their lowest-priced guitars. Fender also markets guitar strings under the Bullet brand.

History

References

Further reading