Dateing SRV Stratocaster- I have a SRV Strat- serial number is SE 927010 - can anyone help me date that number? It seems that the guitars starting with 'SE' are hard to date.also, at what point did Fender switch to Pao Ferro vs. Rosewood for the neck board?

Click to expand.Generally speaking sometime in the 1990s. The first number should be the approximate year.

If for example the serial number was 'SN7XXXXX' the number would be read like this: 'S' - Signature series 'N' - 'Nineties' (likewise 'E' is for 'Eighties' and 'Z' is for 'Zeros' or 2000s) '7' - year 7, so it would have been made in 1997 'XXXXX' - actual sequential number of the decal (not necessarily the guitar) Fender typically uses the decals up; they don't throw away any remaining 1997 (in this example SN7XXXXX) decals on January 2, 1998. You really have to pull the neck and see the dates written or stamped on the neck heel and on the body in the neck pocket to find out when the guitar was really made. FYI - Fender had a bunch of SE8XXXXX and SE9XXXXX decals and they used them well into the 1990s on Clapton, Malmsteen, SRV and Beck Strats; I believe it was 1993 or 1994 before they caught up to the actual year.

EDIT: Well based on Mike's guitar Fender was still using the SE9XXXXX decals at least as late as April 1993 when his guitar's neck was made; and the neck was made 6 months before the guitar was assembled (or at least the body was made - don't they date bodies just before assembly?). It just proves you really have to remove the neck and check the dates with Fenders.

The most important thing to keep in mind when dating a Fender is the highly modular nature of the designs. Like Henry Ford, part of Leo Fender's genius was in optimizing the company's production efficiency. His guitars were built en masse by an entire factory, not a single luthier toiling over one instrument at a time. Features like bolt-on necks and pickups wired into the pickguard all helped the Fender factory churn out guitar after guitar, day after day. This also means that various parts used on a particular guitar may have come from different points in time, so no single number can absolutely define when the instrument was built. Instead, the best approach to dating a Fender is to combine indicators from the design of the instrument, the dates found on the neck and body, along with the serial number.

Once you have the information you need, if you're interested in selling your Fender, you can use Reverb to get it in front of the largest audience of musicians in the world Design Changes and Features Perhaps the best place to start when dating your Fender is to get an approximate idea of the era based on the instrument's design and components. This can be a tall order for someone less versed in guitar history, but we do have some resources here on Reverb to help you out. For starters, there's the Reverb Price Guide which has thousands of entries with pictures and details on various guitars and other gear.

Some browsing around the can definitely help you find which model you have. We also have some other blog posts related to Fender that can hopefully be of some help. There's and that follows the evolution of the most popular Fender guitar of all. Similarly, take a look at for general timeline of the history of everyone's favorite offset guitar.

For Fender during the turning point era of the mid-'60s, check out Body and Neck Dates Through much of Fender's production history, Fender workers would print or write a production date on both bodies and necks where the two pieces meet. These dates will tell when the original part was manufactured, but are not exact indicators of when the guitar was actually put together and finished. Here is what the neck date and body date look like from a 1952 Telecaster: If you're not comfortable removing the neck of a guitar to peek at the date marker, I encourage you to take it to a local tech or luthier. I will also mention briefly pot-codes as a resource (numbers on the internal potentiometers of the guitar). These can definitely be useful in cases where no other numbers exist, but just tell when the pot itself was made. Who knows how long it was waiting in the Fender factory before finding its way into a Tele? Serial Numbers Like the body and neck dates, using serial numbers to date a Fender is not a sure bet.

At many points in Fender's history, serial number usage overlapped again owing to the modular manner of production. Below we'll go into detail about the various serial number schemes employed by Fender as far back as 1950.