ASAT

Gretsch raised the Broadkaster claim again, and the G&L Broadcaster became the ASAT. One collector who tracks these guitars closely puts the first full month of the new name at April 1986. The first name lasted about as long as a new guitar takes to get broken in.

History doesn’t usually rhyme that neatly.

Put one next to a Telecaster and the family resemblance is obvious. So are the edits.

Start with the pickups. The ASAT Special has two big G&L pickups called MFDs, jumbo soapbar-shaped single-coils, made in Fullerton. They’re a lot bigger than the pickups Leo put on a Telecaster, and they look it.

Then the bridge. A Tele has the famous “ashtray,” a steel tray with three saddles. The ASAT has what G&L calls the Saddle-Lock: chrome-plated brass saddles locked into a bridge that’s seated into the end grain of the body. It’s the part of the guitar that most looks like an engineer revising his own work.

He also cut a contour into the back, so the body doesn’t dig into your ribs the way a slab Tele does. The scale stayed at 25.5 inches. The neck is still bolt-on maple. Three-way switch, one volume, one tone. Some things you don’t fix.

From across the room it looks like a Tele. Up close, it’s Leo arguing with his younger self.

The ASAT family grew, and people mix them up. The version with the jumbo pickups and the Saddle-Lock got the name ASAT Special as a catalog badge in late 1992. The ASAT Classic is a different recipe, with a boxed-steel bridge and traditional-size pickups. And the G&L that looks like a Strat is the Legacy, not an ASAT at all. The last American one was the Fullerton Deluxe ASAT Special, and there’s a Tribute version made in Indonesia. Same shape, different factories.

John Jorgenson got a factory natural ASAT in 1987 and played it with the Desert Rose Band and in the early days of the Hellecasters. Later he had a silver sparkle one. In 1995 G&L made him a signature model. He guesses fewer than 200 were built, and he’s careful to call it a guess.

His Hellecasters bandmate Will Ray played an early ASAT too. His signature model ran from 2002 until June 2015.

Leo Fender died in 1991. The ASAT outlived him, and so did the factory in Fullerton, which kept building the Special with the big pickups and the locking bridge he wanted until it closed in September 2025.

The first Broadcaster had to give up its name. The second one did too. In between, the man who built them got thirty-five years to think about what he’d do differently, and then he went and did it.