Sometimes two is better than one.
We are all familiar with the acoustic guitar, featuring six strings, a large body projecting its jangly sound and visions of sitting around a warm campfire playing guitar and singing to our favorite songs. We are also familiar with the six string electric guitar, which comes in so many exotic sizes, shapes, colors, has a thin body and is usually played through a large stack of amplifiers. 80’s hair bands come to mind, banging away on our favorite rock anthems. What if someone were able to put those two guitars together?
In 2019, Fender came out with the Acoustasonic series of guitars, which literally blended the best attributes of an acoustic guitar with that of an electric guitar. At first thought, it doesn’t really make any sense to combine an acoustic and an electric guitar, until you look at it from the angle of the electric guitar player and here is why.
Playing an electric guitar is vastly different from playing an acoustic guitar, as the strings on an electric guitar are lighter gage, taking a lot less effort to depress when forming chords. The reason the strings are heavier gage on an acoustic is because an acoustic doesn’t have an amplifier, meaning the guitar itself needs to project its sound loudly enough to be heard. If you play an electric guitar your technique uses a much lighter touch, which makes it harder to play an acoustic and vice versa. It’s all about muscle memory.
The Fender Acoustasonic series offers a variety of guitars with different options and price levels. The premise is to take the form factor of the most popular Fender electric guitars, hollow them out and install leading pickup technology and digital modeling. The idea is to be able to choose between acoustic or electric guitar sounds on the fly. The Fender American Acoustasonic Telecaster guitar plays very similar to an electric guitar using lighter gage strings, yet has a hollow body design for acoustic resonance coupled with leading pickup and digital modeling technology to provide up to seven different acoustic sounds. Now, when the guitar is unplugged, you hear a single acoustic style, albeit at a much lower volume than a typical dreadnaught acoustic.
Is this guitar the right answer for everyone? Probably not, however it does provide one more way to produce the music we all know and love. Have an awesome day.