Korgscrew
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Posted: Aug. 04 2011, 13:02 |
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| Quote (Olivier @ Aug. 03 2011, 17:19) | | why, why, why? |
Hey, this is a Mike Oldfield forum - no 'why' questions! 
More seriously though, while I suppose nobody knows exactly why that one was chosen over whatever other possibilities were considered at the time (other than that Leo Fender and his team obviously felt it suited the instrument best), it's at least possible to get an idea of how they arrived at it...
Fender headstocks weren't always like the 6-a-side designs we know now - the first prototypes of what became the Fender Broadcaster used a 3-a-side headstock:
At some point, someone must have realised that a 6-a-side design would give a straighter string pull - meaning less friction at the nut and therefore better tuning stability (though of course it's only one of many factors).
The 6-a-side headstocks seem like something that could only be children of the electric age, but actually, you'll have to look back rather further than the 1950s to find their origins, as this headstock, from a guitar built around 1820 in the Vienna workshop of Johann Stauffer, shows:
Stauffer's most notable pupil was a certain Christian Friedrich Martin, who later moved to New York City. He carried on making guitars in the USA with the Stauffer-style headstock, though of course it's no longer the style you'd associate with guitars bearing the C.F. Martin name!
It's interesting to compare the Stauffer headstock to the scroll of a violin viewed side-on:
If you ask me where the idea for the 'circle' came from, that would be my best guess!
I'd of course not be doing my bit here if I didn't also mention Paul Bigsby. You'll have seen his name on the vibrato units that he designed, but he also made guitars, including this famous one that he built for country musician Merle Travis in 1947:
That's a whole 7 years before the Fender Stratocaster appeared...but perhaps I'll come back to that in a moment.
Not a 6-a-side design, but perhaps setting a further precedent for superfluous 'circular' bits on headstocks is this headstock of a 1900 F-style mandolin built by Orville Gibson:
Orville Gibson was interested in bringing elements of violin construction to fretted instruments, so it's highly likely that his headstock scrolls were influenced by violin scrolls (a more direct reference is the scroll on the F-style's body, which it would seem the headstock scroll was designed to echo; it was only at the hands of Lloyd Loar that the F-style mandolin gained violin-like f-holes, though...but that's straying quite a way off topic anyway).
Though Bigsby chose to arrange the tuners slightly differently, creating a straight sloping edge along the left hand side (assuming we're looking at it pointing upwards), the right hand edge follows a very similar line to the Stauffer/Martin headstock. Somehow I find that the 'sharper' feel to the lines has something more of the Gibson F-style to it, though.
Sometimes headstock scrolls can be vulnerable parts of the instrument, prone to breakage, so rounding off and simplifying the bottom of the Bigsby headstock to arrive at the Fender Stratocaster design would make a lot of sense. It no doubt also makes it slightly simpler to manufacture, which was perhaps one of the highest concerns on Leo Fender's list. It no doubt contributes a degree of extra stability to the design as well.
I'd also say that the rounded curves help complement the curves of the guitar's body - I've never seen another headstock design that looks quite right on a Strat-style guitar.
Were Leo and his team improving on Bigsby's design, or did they just arrive at something similar by drawing on the same influences from the past? That's hard to say, though as an aside, something about the point in the middle of the headstock of G&L guitars (a later creation of Leo Fender and George Fullerton) reminds me a little of the point and scroll combination on the left hand side of Orville Gibson's early F-style mandolins (the modern F-style just has the scroll).
Anyway, that's probably enough about headstocks for one day...the short answer is that they did it to keep the strings straight across the nut and they thought it looked nice, plus they felt that keeping all the tuners in a row was more convenient. The 'circle', as you can see from all this, has a fair bit of heritage in instrument building traditions...though of course that doesn't mean you have to like it...
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