I thought Fender just bought the Leo Fender name / copyright / whatever. The G&L designs and electronics didn’t go to them?
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Been there, done that. When Motorola fractured in 2004 and retired me early at 53, Google bought the cellular handset part of the company. All they really wanted was the patents. They sold the manufacturing part to Lenovo, IIRC. Google used the patents to create their own phones.
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Yeah Fender is basically a brand marketing firm at this point, with factories ghost-riding making the same four things they have for 50 years
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I can get behind this but nothing’s going to happen now. When the demand for G&L start to grow in a decade or so, then Fender will bring the Founder special with the correct headstock for $5k. We may also see the MFD pickups in the custom shop but don’t hold your breath for the “Tribute” series.
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The MFD pickup on my Fullerton Fallout is outstanding.
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I hope they stay out of the way of the Studio Pro devs in Germany.
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One of the selling points of the Tributes is they come with the USA made pickups.
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https://www.upfrontguitars.com/september-2025---what-happened-to-g&l-guitars??
Maybe this works??
Edit, nope. If you add the ?? At the end of the url it should work.
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Strange, that’s the only 404 on the blog. Happened sometime today. Another one of those instances where I wish that I saved it as a PDF.
I was able to read it. I had to add two question marks to the end of the URL.
Bass Buzz/Discourse seems to be cutting off the last two characters. They’re missing from your post and greyed out on my repost.
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My guess is they didn’t sell enough guitars? Am I close?
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I can’t get to it by doing a fresh click on the blog page. Maybe it’s a problem with my browser window.
EDIT: Opened for me in a different browser
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Thats a part of it. They didnt manage money well either. Still really unfortunate. I like their basses quite a bit but their guitars have been my favorites so far. They made a lot of direct competitors to Fender / Squier, shocking being Leo and George Fullerton’s company, but in every case that I’ve put my hands on so far, they are all improvements over the original designs.
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I like their bridge design, it seems well thought out.
And the Comanche looks cool. Apart from the headstock 
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I was bummed to learn that this had happened. Luckily, I scored both a Fallout Deluxe (Fullerton) and a Fallout Tribute about a year ago. I have three of their guitars too. I am a sucker for the over-the-top flake finish and nobody did/does them like G&L. As some of you have noted, you really could see how Leo, with some help from George Fullerton, took what he learned along his travels and made design improvements (guitar/bass bridges and the pups). He innovated with G&L. I have my Fender love too but a lot of folks don’t realize how seriously good G&L gear is (as evidenced by them closing shop).
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Me too, but it seems that they were having some identity/marketing issues that helped cause their failure. Whether that’s the reason the Tribute quality was declining, I do not know. What I do know is I have several B stock Tribute basses that I purchased from the Clearance Department at G&L have fewer flaws than the last three ‘A stock’ instruments that I returned to GC and two others that were claimed to be new on Reverb.
I bought my Doheny brand new off of Reverb. If it didn’t have Tribute stamped on the headstock, I’m not sure that I could have told the difference between it and a US built. The fretwork is beautiful.
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With the exception of my experience with the Fallout tribute, I can’t really comment on the quality of that line, as the rest of mine are the Fullerton models. To me, the cool thing about the Tributes is that they use the Fullerton/U.S. pups, at that price point. You don’t see that with Fender standards (albeit that they are fine instruments too).
I think that the craftsmanship is pretty solid on the Fullertons, for something that was still “mass produced.”
I think that it was probably marketing to a great degree. Fender (and Music Man) had such a head start on them. And you don’t see that many acts rocking a G&L (except Tom Hamilton), which must have a lot of influence on purchases. We want to emulate our bass (and guitar) heroes, right?
You mentioned the Doheny guitar. I think that is a perfect example of how G&L built off of Fender gear and made it better. In this case, they took a Jazzmaster design, which is known to have wonky vibrato/trem/bridge design (i.e., challenges staying in tune). And they improved upon that (IMHO), while keeping the cool aesthetics of the offset guitar
I wish that Fender would offer up a few G&L models in the future - the ones that aren’t like a J or a P. Fender offers nothing like the MFD humbuckers that are in the Fallout, Kiloton or L-2000 models. You get that big fat punch, without shelling out for a MM Stingray.
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