HUMBUCKER HEAVEN

With the Espada HH and Espada HH Active, G&L offers two versatile variations on Leo Fender's late-1960s design.

- DAVE HUNTER

LEO FENDER SPENT roughly 20 years at the musical instrument company that bears his name. Perhaps it's due to his storied history there that people often forget he spent another 20 years, from 1971 until his death in 1991, continuing to design guitars suited to the ever-changing needs of contemporary musicians. In addition to Music Man, the company he co-founded in 1971, Leo spent much of his final years at G&L, the company he created in 1980 with his former Fender colleague George Fullerton. 

Remarkably, one of G&L's newest models comes from a design Leo drew up well before the company came into existence. After selling Fender Musical Instruments to CBS in 1965 and launching his consultancy for the company as part of his non-compete agreement, Leo formed CLF Research (for Clarence Leo Fender), an R&D operation into which he poured a ton of new thoughts about guitar design. In 1969, he applied much of his latest thinking to a new model he called the Espada, after which he placed the blueprints and R&D materials in his desk drawer. And there they sat for years; his design would never come to fruition in his lifetime. 

Decades later, the folks at G&L discovered the plans in Leo's old workspace and recognized the opportunity they presented.

Released in 2019, the G&L Espada featured two split-coil Magnetic Field Design (MFD) pickups, an innovative hum-canceling single-coil unit designed by Leo himself and used on several G&L models since the inception of the brand. 

Now come two new takes on this model: the Espada HH and Espada HH Active. One glance at these new variants reveals that the "HH" stands for dual-humbucker, a pickup complement intended to take the Espada into slightly different tonal territory. That aside, both models are very much as Leo sketched out his original design 54 years ago.