Tremolo?

Leo Fender's contributions to the musical community include a lot of confusion about vibrato and tremolo. Leo invented a vibrato unit for his Stratocaster guitar and called it a tremolo unit. Later, he added a tremolo circuit to his amplifiers, and called it vibrato.

Technically, vibrato is a periodic oscillation in pitch while tremolo is a similar oscillation in volume or amplitude. Leo definitely got it wrong when he introduced the Stratocaster with its misnamed "tremolo" unit, but his first amplifier with a tremolo circuit was (correctly) called the Tremolux. When it was pointed out that the tremolo of the Tremolux was definitely something different from the "tremolo" of the Stratocaster, Leo began referring to the amplifier circuit as a "vibrato" feature.

Leo was not the first to build a vibrato unit on a guitar. Leo's early partner, Clayton Orr "Doc" Kaufman, had developed a unit for Rickenbacker many years before the two men formed the K&F company in 1945. But Leo's vibrato unit for the Stratocaster was a definite improvement over anything else that existed at the time. Leo's breakthrough was the realization that, in order to maintain the proper tuning of the instrument, it was essential that the saddle had to move with the attachment point of the strings. Other units of the time all featured some sort of mechanism that pulled the strings across a stationary bridge.

Born in a barn in 1909, Leo Fender did more to shape the sound of modern music than any other individual. His contributions include the invention of the first bass guitar as well as the perfection of mechanical vibrato for the electric guitar and the popularization of the solid-body electric guitar. Learn more about this fascinating man in Fender: The Inside Story by Forrest White.

This excellent biography of Leo Fender, and the companies that he founded, is written by his close friend, Forrest White, who was the head of Fender manufacturing throughout most of the 50s and 60s and one of the founders of MusicMan (later acquired by Ernie Ball). Fender: The Inside Story also reveals many technical details about things like pickup windings and fret placement, as well as the original marketing specification sheets for many of the products produced by the Fender Electric Instruments Company during the years that Leo Fender owned the company.