Fender Marauder

After introducing the Jazzmaster in 1959 and the Jaguar in 1962, between 1965 and 1966, Fender prototyped the Marauder. There were two versions made: Type I, with pickups hidden underneath the pickguard, and Type II, with the pickups mounted in a more conventional fashion on the pickguard. The Type II variation has three pickups, with the bridge pickup slanted as upon a Stratocaster. It also has seven switches and four knobs. The thinking behind the model was to combine the ideas behind the Stratocaster and Jaguar guitars while adding some new features to increase versatility.

The guitar never officially passed the prototype stage, allegedly because the hidden pickups of the Type I variation were either too expensive for mass-production or the technology itself was too expensive to license. It is perhaps the rarest Fender guitar ever made and it is said that only eight Marauders were created (with four of those guitars sporting slanted frets on the fingerboard). Fender cancelled the Marauder in 1966.

The original Fender Marauder prototype is a pre-CBS guitar with an "L" serial number plate suggesting it was built in mid to late 1964. It has only five switches – four pickup controls (one per pickup - on/off/phased) plus a "lead/rhythm" Jaguar style upper-bout switch. It has two sets of volume/tone pots – rollers on top control plate (rhythm position) and traditional pots on the lower control plate (lead position). The pickups were not custom made for the Marauder but rather were stock pickups Fender already used for another instrument. Fender put two of these first Marauders, a sunburst tremolo version and a hard-tail green one, in their 1965–66 catalog as their most expensive guitars, and listed Marauders on more than one price sheet beginning in early 1965 before abandoning the project for unspecified reasons. One possible reason they ditched the Marauder might have been a disagreement of some sort between the new CBS owners of Fender and Porky Freeman, the inventor of the Marauder and owner of the patent. After Fender bailed out, Porky took his patented hidden pickup design to Rickenbacker, and in 1968, Rickenbacker made one prototype of a four-hidden-pickups-beneath-the-pickguard guitar before apparently deciding against going into production, again for unspecified reasons. Both the Fender and Rickenbacker four-hidden-pickups-beneath-the-pickguard Marauder prototypes are known to survive to this day, but nobody has managed to find any other hidden-pickup Marauders and make their existence known to the guitar collecting world. Both of these prototype guitars were initially owned by Porky Freeman and their provenance from him to the current owners has been well-documented by reliable persons who are alive today. The private owners desire anonymity and are known to only a few very dedicated guitar collectors. Later guitars with the three visible pickups and/or slant frets were built on a differently shaped body, and were never officially named by Fender as Marauders or anything else. Still, some people refer to these experimental guitars as Marauders for reasons that have never been and remain unclear. In the late 1990s, the Fender Custom Shop built some guitars that bore some, but not all, of the Marauder characteristics and sold them as Fender Marauders. The reason they weren't entirely accurate representations is that nobody knew the exact specifications of those 1965 catalog Marauders, even amongst Fender old-timers and collectors. The Custom Shop "Marauders" were wired differently, had different pickups, had different body shapes and different dimensions and geometry from the original Marauders in the 1965 Fender catalog.

Around the turn of the 21st century, the Fender Custom Shop made a 12-string Marauder model. However, this guitar was radically different than the mid-1960s original, having fewer switches and a very different body shape.

In October 2011, Fender introduced a new Marauder model as part of the Modern Player entry-level series. This Marauder shares the general body shape of the 1960s original but has a simplified switching system, with only a five-way switch and one volume and one tone. This model is also unique as the first Fender production model to be made with a Koto wood body.