FACTOIDS & TRIVIA

Design work on the Espada began in September 2018. In a nutshell, there was a concept guitar sitting in Leo Fender’s office at the G&L factory that he designed around 1968 while he was under contract with CBS Musical Instruments. Fast forward to 2018 when the current owners of G&L found a drawing for the prototype of the concept guitar. It shows the hum cancelling split-coil pickups and bizzaro bridge as on the concept guitar, but with a fancier control plate. G&L President Dave McLaren thought it would be cool to use the concept guitar and drawing as the basis for a new G&L that incorporated Leo’s latest technology rather than that of the late 1960s. This meant Magnetic Field Design (MFD) pickups rather than alnico rod pickups and a preamp similar to Leo’s preamps of the 1980s that were better suited to the MFDs. In addition, instead of using the strange prototype bridge, a G&L Saddle-Lock bridge would be used. The concept guitar and drawing did not specify a neck (the neck used was a Fender Coronado-ish thing), so Dave dug through the G&L archives and found a template dated 1982 for a previously unused early style G&L guitar neck. A prototype was built and a refined design was introduced at the 2019 Winter NAMM show. The name means “sword” in Spanish and was inspired by the control plate that, to Dave McLaren, looked like a sword. The guitar was availabe in sunburst or natural ash and two new colors were added in 2020: Sonic Blue and Cear Orange. Overall, the guitar is typical G&L -- bright and aggresive. The only nit to pick is that the block inlays demand a bound fingerboard. It looks unfinished otherwise.

  Body: Solid, 2-piece ash

  Finish: Clear Orange, polyurethane

  Neck: 1-piece maple, bolt-on

  Fingerboard: Chechen, pearloid block markers

  Number of Frets: 21

  Pickguard: 3-ply pearloid-black-white plastic

  Bridge: G&L Saddle-Lock, chrome

  Nut: Bone

  Tuners: Gotoh "Kluson Deluxe" style, chrome

  Pickups: Two, G&L split coil MFD hum-canceling

  Controls: Volume, treble, bass, series/parallel switch, preamp switch, 3-way pick-up selector

  Scale Length: 25 1/2 inches

  Neck Width at Nut: 1 11/16 inches

  Body Width at Lower Bout: 13 1/4 inches

  Body Depth: 1 7/8 inches

  Weight: 8.2 lb