The Fender Performer was an electric guitar designed for rock

Rock music

Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...

 and metal

Heavy metal music

Heavy metal is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the Midlands of the United Kingdom and the United States...

 guitarists in the mid 1980s. The Performer was also available as an electric bass

Fender Performer Bass

The Fender Performer was an electric bass guitar released and discontinued in 1985, assembled in Japan. The Performer was also available as an electric guitar.-The Guitar:...

.

Origins

The Performer was first introduced in 1985, and was assembled in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. It was introduced in the transition from the CBS

CBS

CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...

-owned Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company to the new privately-owned Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, and it was discontinued after only one year. The unusual body and headstock shapes have been rumored to have originated in the shape of the scrap wood leftover from making Japanese Stratocasters. The design of the body horns appears to be based on the flat portion of the back of the Stratocaster body.

Features

The body is small with a deep double cutaway. The tuning machines are found on the upper edge of the triangular headstock and a locking nut clamps the strings behind a plastic nut, as typically found on Fender guitars. The rosewood fretboard has 24 jumbo frets and features a locking nut. The bridge is a floating System I tremolo. The controls have inset rubber grips, the tuning heads have fully enclosed gears, and the jack socket is an enclosed, not 'skeleton', type, in contrast to many other Fender products with 'economy' hardware. A variety of metallic poly finishes were available including a sunburst pattern (non-metallic).

The two pickups are custom humbucker

Humbucker

A humbucker is a type of electric guitar pickup, first patented by Seth Lover and the Gibson company, that uses two coils, both generating string signal. Humbuckers have higher output than a single coil pickup since both coils are connected in series...

s which both sit at an angle as in the case of a Stratocaster or Telecaster bridge pickup. It appears that the coils are offset to keep the magnets in line with the strings, although they are potted in epoxy so the magnets cannot be seen. The guitar features a volume knob, a tone knob, a 3-way pickup selector switch, and a coil tapping

Coil tapping

Coil tapping is tapping into the inner coil of a single coil pickup to get a lower output/vintage tone . It is often confused with coil splitting, which is switching off one of the coils of a humbucker, giving the pickup a single coil tone....

switch. The tone knob used stacked 250k and 1M pots with center detent which may have been a predecessor to the TBX tone control used in later Fender models.

Collectibility

Many years after the introduction of the instrument, it came to be recognized as a versatile rock instrument of fine quality. Recent Ebay auctions (as of 2010) have seen Fender Performers command prices as much as US$1,000 and higher.