Building Fender With Justin Norvell: Iconic Guitars, The Art Of Restraint, And Learning To Play Faster With AI

0:00The product, we can put it on a pedestal, but it is a tool. This is a tool for the musician, so it has to have a way to integrate into their workflow, into how they want to use it. You sit at a piano, you sit at a set of drums, but you wear a guitar.

0:26Some products transcend utility, and then they become part of a culture, an identity, a movement. You always remember the first time you use them. And then they become part of you. A vehicle for self-expression. And that's how I feel about the electric guitar. Today's guest has spent his entire career at the intersection of music, craft, and technology. He has helped shape one of the most iconic brands in the world. Justin Lavelle is the president of Fender. A company that doesn't just make instruments, but actually helped define modern music itself. It shaped generations of artists along the way.

1:03In this conversation, we go deep into what it actually takes to build an iconic brand. Through the lens of someone who leaves both sides of the creative process. As a working musician and as a builder, leading one of the most influential brands in music history. We talked about why great products come from understanding human emotion, not just technology. How Fender balances heritage with innovation. what it means to design tools that serve creativity rather than overshadow it, and how building for artists today means building for a hybrid world of physical craft and a digital experience. This is a conversation about taste, about restraint, and about identity, and what it actually means to build something truly iconic.

1:50Here's my conversation with Justin.

1:58Justin, it's a pleasure to have you on the show Thank you so much for joining me today Thank you for having me, it's an honor So this is going to be a special one I'm a massive music fan, massive guitar fan I own a Fender Stratocaster So this is going to be a unique one for me And I hope everybody else will enjoy it the same way I would You were a working musician You were a songwriter well before you joined Fender. Yes. And at Fender, you started in sales, you moved to marketing, eventually led off product before you became the president. That's quite the journey. I want to start at the beginning of that transformation.

2:33And I was curious about your experience being a young musician. What extremities did you play? What type of music? What drew you to become a musician from the first place? Music was around me growing up. and I actually would say Fender is one of my earliest brand memories. I remember my father played guitar just a little bit, not really much. There's a guitar in a case, but I remember seeing the picks, the guitar picks laying around sometimes in the Fender brand just struck me somehow and I remembered that over time. But there was a fantastic record collection in the house, always listening to music.

3:12It was very big, went to concerts as a kid and started playing the drums originally. But, you know, I think their portability or lack thereof kind of got in the way. And I started being more drawn to guitar. This is dating myself here. This is the era of MTV and, you know, all of that. That used to be my only channel when I was a kid. Yeah, exactly. So this is the 80s and I'm just obsessed with music. And so I was in a ton of bands. My parents worked for the government and it took them to the UK for three years. I lived in the UK while from like 12 to 15 and was in a band there with some art students that were probably eight years older than myself.

4:01That was like my first really good band. came back finished high school and went to Arizona for college and while I was there I was in bands and it was a really fertile time musically there was you know this is when Nirvana is big and all the grunge bands and all of that stuff so there were frenzies there was a Seattle frenzy and then afterwards it was like what's the next city and so in Phoenix there were a couple bands that got signed and it seemed like, oh, this is possible. So that was my goal. That was my dream, my band. And I got a job at Fender after finishing university, but that was a day job.

4:45You know, I was convinced. That was your side gig. Side gig. I was making blueprints in R &D was my first entry into Fender. But as time went on, And I just was enthralled with the making of the tools and the design of these tools and how this all works. That side of the business was a kind of magnetic pull. And I still make music today. I still release music. And I do it for fun. I've always loved design. I've always loved art. And Fender's products really encapsulate that. They were so stark and unique. And if someone thinks of an electric guitar in their mind, they will draw a Stratocaster or a Telecaster.

5:38But in 1951, in 1954, all the guitars were the big jazz hollow bodies that were built way differently. So Leo Fender's style was, you know, building guitars out of solid planks of wood that you'd put together, you know. So it was anathema to, you know, the guitar building community. The timing was right and people were looking, the rock and roll thing was coming and people were looking for a new style and a new sound. That shift from the guy who makes music to the guy who helps others make their own art or music. Do you have to be a musician? to be doing that role? Do you have to be in bands? Like, is that like a qualifier because otherwise you don't have the empathy?

6:26Or on the very side, it's like, what did it do for you? Like, where was the edge you got from it? I think the fact that many of us are the customer is something that keeps us very plugged in. But as far as at Fender overall, there are people from all kinds of different industries and all kinds of walks of life. I think it just gets accentuated, the musician thing. I think touch points like marketing has a lot more people that are close to, you know, you have to understand the kind of psychological profile of a musician, etc. And product development, I think, are the two big areas where that does matter.

7:07And I think it is just because it's in your blood. You understand it at a molecular level. one thing i heard is that new products come along you just sit down and play them there's a new product a new feature a new pickup something the team came up with and you sit down is this like everybody's watching justin to see how he like everybody takes a takes a big inhale exactly like no i i think that it's it's very uh kind of democratic that what we do as a team and um There are things, I think that one of the things that's very interesting is they say you can't be all things to all people, but our products are so versatile and they're so diverse.

7:53And there are things that are not for me that we still release that are great. Some of our amplifiers that are meant for super heavy metal, high gain music. It's like we find the person in the company that is kind of who is the expert in that. You sit at a piano, you sit at a set of drums, but you wear a guitar. And the subjectivity of, do I like a large neck? Do I like a small neck? Do I like it to be heavy? Do I like to be light? The colors, the aggressiveness of the sound, the subjectivity of it becomes part of your kind of non-vocal voice, you know, and your expression of yourself and your creativity.

8:39I love music. I love guitars. At the same time, you know, if you push me hard about what goes into the making of a guitar, you know, I could give you the basic, you know, elementary school probably answer. But I'm kind of wondering if you can walk us through what's the process like? There's a new guitar that you want to bring to market. Like, what is the process internally if you can kind of do the high level? Also, you know, the manufacturing taking it to market. But how does that look like? It goes a couple different ways. I mean, sometimes we're working with an artist and we're doing a signature model.

9:14We've worked with Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, younger players, John Frusciante from the Chili Peppers, John Mayer, many artists of the years. So they're part of the R &D process, basically. A hundred percent. And they'll say what they want, what they don't want, and then you try to make that come alive. And there's prototypes back and forth, and there's a little bit of, I wouldn't say trial and error, but just dialing in. It is a symphony of tiny adjustments. You know, I remember standing in our model shop in R &D and Ed O 'Brien plays with Radiohead. And he was standing there and he could feel ten thousandths of an inch in the neck.

10:04He was just like, it's a little big. It's not quite right. And it was, we measured it and, you know, and it was like ten thousandths of an inch. Whether it's that or someone who's our pickup designer just designs a new pickup and we want to build a guitar around it. It goes through our product department. It's like, does this have a reason to exist? Is there a space in the market? Who is the customer? And then from there, it would go into design. And we'd just be like, does this rendering or this idea manifest in real life? as what we hoped it would be. And from there, it can kind of start to get into, you know, all of the drawings, the programming, cross-functional meetings.

10:52You get into trying to get it into manufacturing, you know, and commercialized with engineering. So there's all of those steps and NPRs and pilots. And there are 150 hand processes in the making of a guitar. And beginning to end is roughly, what, a year? Six months? For something super fast, yeah. It's anywhere from six months to three years. Amplifiers can take even longer. And then you're never done because our software-enhanced products have updates. So we're doing firmware updates all the time. And for folks who are familiar with guitar but not with pickups, which is essentially what makes it like a guitar.

11:39It's the microphone for the strings, you know, essentially. So, yeah, so I'm sorry that like I just get into the jargon. But yeah, the guitar is basically the neck, the body, the pickups and the electronics are kind of what make an electric guitar a guitar. And those are all super important for different reasons. You know, when you go into the history of Leo Fender, one of the things I love when I was researching a bit was the notion that the first shop was really a gathering place. for musicians. Yes. People just came along. He was a radio repair person. So when guitar players would come around and need electronics worked on, they would go to him, even though he didn't make or sell or distribute these things.

12:27And then he started looking at amplifiers and their electric guitars and having ideas. And he was not a guitar player. he just approached it in much more of a Henry Ford kind of utilitarian. How do I make it not break? How do I make it serviceable? He used to say, if I have a hundred dollars to make a product, I'll spend 99 making it work and one making it pretty. So it was, it was a much different take that he had. And so he started building his own guitars and amps, started with lap steels. but as he started doing guitars like by 1951 I mean many companies would be happy ecstatic to have one product that hits and becomes a thing so the Telecaster which is behind me right there that I'm pointing at you know and that's Keith Richards that's Bruce Springsteen that's you know Sheryl Crow that's iconic instrument the Telecaster if that happened in one year you'd be like, wow, what a great business.

13:33The precision bass also happens in 1951. In that year, same year, the precision bass is the first popular electric bass. And this truly transforms music forever because a band could only be as loud as the old big upright bass that everybody used to play. and now you have a fretted electric bass and everybody could get louder and then music started sounding different when people were louder things started, amps started distorting which led to more rock and roll and just different genres and like Quincy Jones said it was the defining invention of the 20th century you know, the Wright Brothers and the Fender bass but so, and then it doesn't stop 1954 the Stratocaster you know 19 which is by far today the most popular most popular electric guitar in the world and the irony of Leo saying you know out of a hundred dollars I'll spend one dollar making it pretty the use of the Danish and French curves and design elements of these guitars are so compelling elegant simplicity classic design in a way I've heard the phrase is coloring inside the lines to the scholarship.

15:00So it's about innovation within guardrails, correct? Is that the way you would explain this? Yes, and I much prefer coloring inside the lines to golden handcuffs, but it's different versions of the same thing. It's just somebody comes in to the company and they're like, they hear this, and they're like a free spirit, creative. What does that mean for them, coloring inside the line? I think really the silhouette in its main form, I think, is the biggest line that we would color inside of. So almost visually, basically. Yeah, yeah. The coloring inside the lines is honor that history. But then this modern world, the contemporary use case, because the product, we can put it on a pedestal, but it is a tool.

15:51It is a sonic paintbrush for someone. Like we make art so people can make their art. But the main thing is, this is a tool for the musician. So it has to have a way to integrate into their workflow, into how they want to use it. I think people sometimes don't realize how much the nuances matter. So maybe like, is there like an adjustment that you made inside the line that actually had a massive implication for players and for music in general? And then on the flip side, you know, something you've done, which was kind of risky, that was an interesting learning bet, but didn't work out. Yeah, I would say actually when we were trying to put technology on the guitar, we did a USB guitar, we actually sold it with Apple and realized that the guitar itself is sacred and no one wants potential obsolescence to make its way onto the guitar.

16:54You should be able to pick up a guitar at any point in time and not need to daisy chain three adapters together to make it work. And people buy a guitar thinking, I'm going to play this in 20 years. And that was an interesting one because it felt like, well, this is where the world's going. And look, now you don't need an amp. You just plug from the guitar right into your laptop. That sounds amazing. And it's like we got an amazing pushback. There's the whole idea of moving from building a great guitar to actually help somebody become a guitarist, which is where the whole ecosystem comes into play, right?

17:32This is where digital plays a big role. And there's this idea of I can take out the artist and everybody in a way. When you think of this ecosystem, what is success? Yeah, it's acquisition and retention, I would say. you know, guitar does not have a little league, you know, or a kind of system that just pushes people into it. So that funnel is important from a business perspective, but it is also keeping people playing. So the ecosystem is like Fender Play is an app that we have. I mean, 4 million people have downloaded it and that helps you play and that helps you learn. and it helps you get to that point where it is not an instant gratification skill.

18:27To play guitar, you have to put work in and you have to do your, maybe not 10 ,000 hours, but you definitely have to get over a certain hump to proficiency where it's not frustrating and you're actually getting joy and all of those things out of it. And play gives you quick wins where you can get to joy faster. and maybe not get frustrated as early. It used to be that you had to be a professional almost and spend a lot of money to go to a recording studio, and then the pressure clock is on. And so we have things like Fender Studio. It's like one-touch recording. The Fender of tomorrow. I'm sure a lot of your head is in the future.

19:09Five, ten years from now, we have this massive emergence of technology, especially with AI. we know creative lives will become even more important potentially in people's life what role does a smart enabled hybrid hybrid instrument play what role do you want fender to play can you envision that guitar or even experience of the future on the recording side on the digital ecosystem and amplification side, AI augmenting, I want to get this sound that I hear on this record and not doing trial and error for weeks trying to get there and maybe not getting there. So tone matching, things like that, make me something that sounds like this in this key that I can work on this riff that I'm playing with and obviously accompaniment and you can become a one-man band a lot easier with those tools at the same time much like when we were saying the guitar itself does not get the tech put on it the the outboard gear does what you connect it to, the guitar itself can also lean into being something real, something human, you know, in these moments where people kind of may want a digital cleanse or just to kind of have a very, you know, now physical experience.

20:45And so I think there's a marriage there of human creativity, but then also plugging it in, you know, to a digital ecosystem that can augment what you were doing. You know, the tools that are going to help people get better, faster, stay engaged are fantastic. And that's where I see it all going. I'm envisioning an image, what you're saying that the guitar is at the center and in many ways, it stays, you know, it becomes more modern and innovative, but stays very much adhering to those lines of Fender. But around it, there is transformation on a whole different level where everything from I can get the sound I want really quickly, the tone I want really quickly, I can get the adjustments I want really quickly, I can learn very fast because somebody is giving me feedback and they can watch me play, which is very costly to get a personalized tutor.

21:44So in a way, we should be seeing more musicians come out. Absolutely. The barriers are lowering. The ability to collaborate, send things back and forth with people you don't even know, you know, that you meet online or find. It's not, are you in the same town? Can we go to someone's garage and play really loud until we get told to stop? You know, so all the tethers are being removed. So things are just totally evolving in terms of how music is reproduced, how it is recorded, and just how it's made and how people collaborate together. Because even big artists right now are sending music back and forth and recording in disparate locations.

22:34So we're just riding that wave. If you can snap your fingers right now and a new technology emerge that would make making music so much better, what would that be for you? I think it would be an improvement to the technology that would allow people to learn to play faster and to progress past the points where people quit. and I think that's the biggest thing. I think it's always been a thing that we probably lose up to 90 % of people who are guitar intenders, but they don't stick with it and I think that once you get over the hump to the joy, everybody wishes they did. And then somebody young, aspiring professional, she comes to you and she's like, I want to be, I love music, I love guitar, I want to be at the intersection of guitar building and technology, what would you have her go learn or work at?

23:35Everybody approaches it initially from the art level and the idea of, you know, making a beautiful guitar, but understanding, I think, the psychological side of the business and understanding a customer and understanding what problem are you solving? Are you just making something pretty and that you like or that shows your skills? Or are you solving a need? Are you understanding what the needs are out there? I think it's interesting sometimes where we have four good ideas and you want to put them all in a product. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just put one in or just two or, you know, don't overdo it because you're actually going to start to, A, lose the focus of what this product is.

24:24B, maybe one of these other features might turn some of those people off. So it's really one of the biggest skills, I think, that's the most important is that understanding and the ability to kind of Socratically ask all those questions about behavior. not just making things not just creating a product and putting it out there but understanding the the why the product exists the who it's for how it's going to be used and putting that all together because you can make you know well-built beautiful guitars all day but if you if you're not answering those questions it's not going to be you know what you're hoping.

25:08Justin, thank you so much. I've learned so much in this interview. This was a personal pleasure of mine. Me as well. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I love this conversation with Justin, not just because of his deep understanding of how products or music are made, but because of how clearly he articulates something that is very easy to forget in this world of technology. And that's that great products are not just about features. They're about intentionality. It's about balancing progress with heritage. It's about having tremendous respect for the people who use them. Here are some of my favorite takeaways on the conversation.

25:47First, it was clear that at Fender, the highest form of product design is restraint. As Justin said, innovation doesn't always mean adding more. Sometimes it means knowing exactly what not to touch. Fender learned this the hard way. When they actually tried to put technology on the guitar itself, they started adding USB ports and building tech, and the pushback was immediate and visceral. Fender's insight was simple but profound. The guitar is sacred. Innovation belongs around it, in the amps, in the software, in the learning tools, not inside the guitar. That's not conservatism. That's respect for a tool people expect to be playing 20 years from now.

26:35Next is the idea that great products don't express the maker. They disappear for the user. Whether it's neck size, weight balance, pickup response, just ensure that the artist can feel the smallest nuance. That level of sensitivity reveals something very profound. A great product gets out of the way, and then they become an extension of the person using it. The moment the product starts expressing the maker more than the user, you've lost. Third, the hardest product problem for Fender isn't acquisition, since everyone would love to learn how to play guitar. The biggest problem is helping people get past the frustration cliff.

27:16Up to 90 % of people who intend to learn guitar quit. Not because they don't love music, it's because guitar is not an instant gratification skill. Fender's biggest bet isn't on pros. It's on retention for digital and a physical ecosystem that can deliver joy. From feedback loops on how to get better, to better paths, to sounding good enough, to keep going, to playing some pretty amazing pieces you always like to play. The deep insight here is that the real competition for Fender isn't another product. It's actually discouragement. Lastly, one of the most powerful ideas from the conversation is that AI doesn't replace creativity.

27:59It becomes a force multiplier for it. For most of history, making music required clearing enormous barriers, whether it's access to instruments, expensive studios, technical mastery, and years of learning to just sound good enough to keep going. AI changes all of that, not by writing the music for you, but by helping you get to joy faster. Imagine imagining the tone you're hearing in your head without weeks of experimentation, giving you feedback instantly when you practice alone, helping you record and iterate without needing a studio or a band. The result is amazing. The result is not fewer musicians.

28:40It's more musicians, more creation, more collaboration, more voices. And that's the real unlock. When the cost of expression drops, culture expands. I'm Tomer Cohen. Thanks for watching. You've been watching Building One. Our show is hosted by Tomer Cohen. Building One is produced and edited by Mason Cohn and the team at Coastal Production Works. This episode was mixed by Tim Boland. At LinkedIn, our team includes Rachel Karp, Sarah Storm, Dave Pond, and Alicia Mann, with support from Alex Kuznetsova and Mujib Merdad. Until next time, keep building.