The last company Leo Fender founded.

G&L was the last guitar company Leo Fender founded, and its name says who was involved: George & Leo. The George was George Fullerton, Fender’s colleague since the early days of his first company; the third founder was Dale Hyatt, another veteran of the original Fender business. English Wikipedia, citing Fullerton’s own 1993 book, lists all three.

The founding date depends on whom you ask. Guitar World has repeatedly said G&L was established in 1979, the year Leo Fender’s ties with Music Man were cut. English Wikipedia gives 1980 and says the company was incorporated in May of that year, and G&L’s own website carried the line “Made in Fullerton Since 1980.” We say the company was founded at the end of the 1970s and incorporated in 1980.

The location stayed constant. G&L worked from a building on Fender Avenue in Fullerton, California — the street named after its founder — which Guitar World described in 2023 as the same facility where Music Man began. The company called itself “The Birthplace of the Bolt-On,” a reference to the screwed-on necks Leo Fender had popularised decades earlier with Fender.

Fender was past 70 when G&L began, and he worked there for the rest of his life. He died in March 1991. G&L’s own history says he finished his last prototype shortly before; that is the company’s story, which we repeat as such.

Refinements of a familiar shape.

G&L’s instruments looked familiar on purpose. Its guitars and basses borrowed outlines that players knew from Leo Fender’s earlier work, and the changes were mostly under the surface. A 2023 Guitar World feature on the company, written with its co-operation, listed the features it credited to Fender’s G&L years: Magnetic Field Design pickups, a passive treble-and-bass tone control, the Tri-Tone preamp, the Dual-Fulcrum vibrato, the Saddle-Lock bridge and, in 1989, a vibrato with fine tuners. Those are the company’s own descriptions of what was new.

The model names became a catalogue that lasted decades. The company’s website, still online in October 2026, lists guitars including the ASAT, Comanche, Legacy, S-500, Doheny, Skyhawk and Espada, and basses including the JB, the L-1000, L-2000 and L-2500, the SB-1, SB-2 and Kiloton. Production was organised into ranges named CLF Research, Fullerton Deluxe and Custom Shop for American-made instruments, and Tribute for cheaper imports. Wikipedia says the Tribute line was introduced in 2003 and first made in Korea by Cort.

Its players included Carl Perkins, who according to Wikipedia used a G&L Broadcaster, a gift from Leo Fender, as his main guitar for the last thirteen years of his life, and Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains. The 2023 Guitar World feature added Aerosmith’s Tom Hamilton, Ben Gibbard and Eddie Willis.

After Fender’s death the business changed hands within the family circle. Wikipedia, citing George Fullerton’s 2005 book, says Leo’s widow, Phyllis Fender, passed management to John C. McLaren of BBE Sound, a Fullerton audio company; the G&L website says she chose McLaren, a friend of Leo’s, to take over. His sons Dave and Johnny McLaren later ran it, with Dave McLaren described as president. George Fullerton stayed on as a consultant until his death in July 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this guide are American electric-guitar names outside the Fender and Gibson pair, though several trace back to one or the other. Music Man began in 1971, formed by the former Fender men Forrest White and Tom Walker with Leo Fender as a silent partner, English Wikipedia says; Ernie Ball bought it in 1984, and the company says it has made instruments in San Luis Obispo, California, ever since. G&L was the company Leo Fender set up with George Fullerton in Fullerton, California; Guitar World reported in November 2025 that its closure had been confirmed.

Heritage was founded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1985 by former Gibson employees who stayed when Gibson moved to Nashville, and remains there. Kramer, founded in Neptune, New Jersey, in 1976, has belonged to Gibson since 1997, Wikipedia says.

Dean, started by Dean Zelinsky in Chicago, has been owned since 1997 by Armadillo Enterprises of Tampa, Florida, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June 2026, Guitar.com reported. Reverend, founded by Joe Naylor in the Detroit area in 1997, now gives an address in Toledo, Ohio. B.C. Rich grew from Bernardo Chavez Rico’s family shop in Los Angeles and now lists an address in Orlando, Florida; its owner since 2019 is not named in the sources we checked.

Where guitars are made varies even within one brand: B.C. Rich’s own product pages list the United States, Korea and Indonesia.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Silence on Fender Avenue.

G&L did not announce its end; it went quiet. In October 2025 the Orange County Register reported that the company had “gone silent after 45 years.” The paper found that BBE Sound, G&L’s parent, had terminated its corporate status with California’s Secretary of State on 28 October 2025, and that parts had been thrown into dumpsters during October. It could not reach the McLaren brothers, and nobody at G&L confirmed the closure. The director of the Fullerton Museum Center, which has a Leo Fender gallery, did confirm it.

Days later Guitar World interviewed a former employee, Steve Araujo, who had left that August. He said staff had been furloughed on 15 September and let go on 29 September with severance, that the factory was “pretty much gutted,” and that no more G&Ls would be made on Fender Avenue. That is one former employee’s account. The magazine also reported, from trademark filings, that Fender Musical Instruments had applied at the start of October 2025 for the “Leo Fender” name and likeness. A rumour that Fender had bought G&L itself was not confirmed by anyone in the Register’s reporting, and in June 2026 Guitar World said Fender “did not take on the full G&L operation.”

What remained went to a reseller. The same June 2026 report said MIRC, a Tennessee company that buys and refurbishes surplus stock, had bought G&L’s finished guitars, bodies, necks and parts and was selling them through independent shops. Guitar World called it “most definitely not a comeback.” We found no announcement of a relaunch in the sources we checked. G&L’s website remained online in October 2026 with text written as if the company were still trading; readers should treat it as out of date.

For a design guide, G&L shows the limits of a founder’s name: it had Leo Fender’s last ideas and his street address, yet it always competed with the company that carried his surname. Compare Fender, his first company, and Music Man, the brand he left to start this one. For this guide we use oxblood, maple and tobacco with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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