Larry’s Lab: Fender Voyager Concept

What’s Larry’s Lab?  Fender’s CEO Larry Thomas is a guitar guy.  It’s obvious when you talk to him the passion that he has for the history of the brand.  The visions he has for the future of the products are on display in Larry’s Lab, a very special room we were ushered into at NAMM 2012.  The guitars in this room have been commsioned by Larry to push the envelope.  They run the gamut from wild design studies to familiar Fender shapes with new manufacturing techniques under the hood.  These are all one-off prototypes; we got authorization from Larry himself to show them to you here.  

Here we have some awfully sexy guitars.  These are the Fender Voyager Concept, in modern (black) and vintage (white) trim.  These are from the mind and hands of Josh Hurst, who is a bad ass builder and designer with Charvel.   The modern Voyager has Neodymium Concealed concept pickups under  that killer chrome pickguard, and a an Ebony/Maple laminate neck.  The vintage concept has a more traditional pickup layout, and black block inlays on the maple fingerboard.  It’s hard to design a new guitar shape that doesn’t suck, and these two here not only don’t suck at all, they may be the best looking new design we have seen in years.