The Making of Fender’s American Professional Series

By the mid-2010s, Fender was undergoing a transformation. The company had been through a period of corporate instability and was refocusing on product development under the leadership of CEO Andy Mooney, who joined Fender in 2015 after previous stints at Disney and Nike. As Fender’s CEO, Mooney pushed for modernization across the board, from product to marketing. He was instrumental in pushing Fender toward a more player-focused and innovative strategy, including launching Fender Play, expanding the Custom Shop, and refreshing the core product lines.
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At that time, Fender was periodically refreshing different parts of its product line by launching new series. In 2016, they had just replaced the American Deluxe Series with the American Elite Series, focusing on contemporary features and player-centric innovations.
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The introduction of the American Professional Series was a natural progression in this modernization effort. ​
Unveiled in December 2016, the American Professional Series, affectionately known as American Pro Series, succeeded the long-standing American Standard Series.
​It was developed as a culmination of feedback from musicians, research and development by Fender’s product teams, and a desire to create a new “gold standard” for American-made instruments.

Justin Norvell, then Fender’s VP of Fender’s Electric Guitars and Basses division, was one of the main people responsible for the success and direction of the project. He emphasized the importance of these updates, noting that even minor adjustments can significantly impact a player’s experience. In an interview with Corey Seymour for Vogue, Norvell remarked: 

“The design challenge is to find a way to color inside the lines—to evolve something while holding dear what people love about it. […] On guitars like this, every screw, every location of every knob, is viewed by many as holy, and if you’ve put 10,000 hours into playing this guitar, you notice these things.”

Justin Norvell

American Pro Stratocaster: What Changed

The American Professional Stratocaster wasn’t just a cosmetic update of the American Standard Stratocaster—it introduced several key changes:
 

• New “Deep C” neck profile. It was a slightly thicker and more rounded shape compared to the previous Modern “C” profile --somewhat between a Modern “C” and “U”. It was a modern twist on classic neck shapes, designed to accommodate a wide range of playing styles—including thumb-over techniques—while keeping comfort and speed in mind. It also provided a solid grip, helping with string bending, vibrato, and chord muting. Players who prefer a slim neck might find it a bit chunkier at first, but many appreciate the added support and control over time.

 

• Narrow-tall frets. Narrow tall frets are taller but slimmer than medium jumbo frets of the previous American Standard. Narrow tall frets feel better for techniques like hammer-on and pull-off (because less pressure needs to be applied), and string bending (because there is less friction between the fretboard and fingers).
  However, Narrow tall frets can also increase the chance of accidentally pushing notes out of tune (because there is a larger gap between the fretboard and strings). This is why Medium jumbo works better for players with a heavier touch. Medium Jumbo frets feel easier to slide up and down the fretboard.

• Upgraded tuners. Like the American Standard tuning machines, they featured staggered post heights—taller posts for the low E and A strings, and shorter posts for the D, G, B, and high E strings. The staggered design increased the break angle over the nut and improved tuning stability. However, new tuners had a gear ratio of 14:1 and represented a significant upgrade over the previous Fender Standard Series tuners, which were not staggered and had a lower gear ratio of 12:1. The American Professional tuners offer better tuning precision and stability.

 

• New V-Mod pickups.

 

• Treble-bleed circuit, a passive circuit that preserved the guitar’s brightness and clarity when the volume knob was turned down. It consisted of a 0.0012µF capacitor combined with a 150kΩ resistor, wired in parallel across the volume potentiometer. It seems that almost all treble-bleed circuits used on the American Professional Stratocasters were PCB-mounted, although the service manual shows a discrete-component treble-bleed circuit. However, this can suggest that Fender used both assembly methods—discrete wiring and PCB—during the production of the American Professional I series.

American Professional Stratocaster wiring diagram. Note the Treble Bleed Circuit

Treble Bleed PCB-Board

• Upgraded bridge with pop-in arm.

 

• New Case and a new color (Antique Olive)

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The V-Mod Pickups 

Among the most significant developments in this series was the introduction of the V-Mod pickups, a set of meticulously engineered single coils designed to bridge the gap between vintage character and modern performance.
The “V” in V-Mod stood for “Vintage-Modified,” and that name perfectly captured the philosophy behind their creation. Fender's tone team, led by the legendary pickup designer Tim Shaw, set out to honor the sonic heritage of classic Stratocaster tones while fine-tuning them for the demands of contemporary players.

Tim Shaw

“When they asked me to work on American Professional pickups, I thought about the magnets and specifically how they sounded whether in the bridge, middle, or neck position.  That’s been done on a boutique level before, but this gave us an opportunity to voice them for position and purpose on instruments produced at a larger scale.”

Tim Shaw

Shaw, known for his deep respect for Fender’s history and his technical precision, took an innovative approach to these pickups. Rather than using a single type of magnet for each pickup, he blended different alnico grades within each coil—a bold move that allowed Fender to sculpt the tonal response of each string position.

“The first challenge with it was to do something interesting, but not mess it up. They were curious to see what I could come up with. I had been doing a lot of work with different pickups and different magnets because we had various combinations of AlNiCo 2, 3, 4, and 5 in stock. I'd worked with them over the years, but this was a time when I was actually focusing on listening to the differences between these pickups.
I started thinking about mixing magnets within the pickups. You've got plain strings and wound strings and they respond entirely differently. In a lot of Fender pickups, there's a tendency for things to be really bright if the magnets are strong, otherwise, it will sound mushy.
I started messing around with AlNiCo 5 and 2 primarily, although there's some other stuff we've done with AlNiCo 3 as well, and ended up with a bunch of pickups where we were mixing magnets. The result was that for the most part, the plain strings have one type of magnet, while wound strings have another. We came up with some pretty interesting stuff.”

Tim Shaw

This hybrid magnet design gave each pickup a unique voice, tailored for its position. “The trick with the Strat is that positions two and four are just as important as positions one, three, and five,” said Tim. “And we discovered that if we weren’t careful the ‘quack’ of two and four went away.  So, we then focused on reversing the magnets on the middle pickup, with AlNiCo 2 on the bass and AlNiCo 5 on the treble because it made the quack sounds better.”

​Tim ended up with different solutions for each pickup and position. The neck pickup had AlNiCo 2 for the wound strings and AlNiCo 3 for the trebles. The middle pickup had AlNiCo 2 for the basses and AlNiCo 5 for the trebles, and the bridge pickup had AlNiCo 5 all the way across.

Tim Shaw and his team found it impossible to align the bridge saddles in a way that allowed both the high and low E strings to pass directly over the center of the pole pieces on the bridge and neck pickups at the same time.
​To prevent the strings from sitting too close to the edges of the fingerboard, they chose a setup in which the E strings passed over the inner edge of their respective neck pickup pole pieces.

V-Mod Pole Pieces

The V-Mod pickups have received mixed reviews. While many players appreciate their balanced and versatile tonal qualities, some have described them as “harsh sounding with too much high end,” making it difficult to achieve a desirable tone without significant EQ adjustments. Others have compared their sound to cheap ceramic pickups, citing issues with clarity and note separation, particularly under dynamic playing conditions.

The Shawbuckers

The American Professional Stratocaster HSS Shawbucker was equipped with a Tim Shaw’s Shawbucker at the bridge position. “That pickup also is not wax-potted,” said Tim Shaw. “Almost everything else we've done with humbuckers has been wax-potted. Those are not. The original pickups at Gibson were not wax-potted ever, largely because of the materials they used. First off, it would have been an extra manufacturing step, which they tended to avoid if possible. Second off, the material the bobbins were made out of was a material called Butyrate, which melts at a relatively low temperature: the bobbins would have softened up in the wax bath. There is a sound you get and a transparency, and I’m going to use the word breath again, that you get in an unpotted pickup that I really like and which really suits this thing quite well.”

One particularly impactful feature they designed for the American Standard Stratocaster—and later carried over into the American Professional series—was the stacked volume pot. This innovation made a significant difference in tonal performance.
The overall resistance value of a volume pot influences how pickups sound: higher resistance preserves more top-end frequencies, while lower resistance tends to dampen them. 

Traditionally, Fender pickups used 250K pots, which suited single coils well, whereas Gibson-style humbuckers typically used 500K pots to maintain clarity.
However, on Stratocasters equipped with an HSS configuration, a compromise was necessary. A 500K pot would make the single coils sound overly bright, while a 250K pot would suppress the humbucker’s output. To address this, they implemented a stacked pot—one dedicated to the single-coils and the other to the humbucker—ensuring each pickup type performed well.

For the American Professional Stratocaster HH Shawbucker, the bridge pickup they used with the HSS configuration became the neck pickup for the two-humbucking Strat and the slightly warmer Shawbucker 2 was used at the bridge. The Shawbucker 2 had a bit more wire on it, but it wasn’t tremendously hotter. It was hot enough that the Shawbucker at the neck and the Shawbucker 2 at the bridge were well balanced. There was also a treble bleed circuit that was specifically voiced for them.

According to Tim, the Shawbuckers had an AlNiCo 2 magnet, because AlNiCo 5 would have been too crunchy, AlNiCo 3 would have been too mellow, and AlNiCo 4 would have been a bit crunchier. AlNiCo 2 was just right.  

How the V-Mod and the Shawbucker were developed

The development of V-Mod pickups took place between California and Tennessee, as Tim Shaw was based in Nashville. There, he worked out of a shop measuring about 3,600 square feet—roughly 360 square meters. The team consisted of just four people. The space functioned as a kind of R&D facility, where much of the prototyping occurred.
Tim asked his team in the R&D department at Corona to wind sets of single coils using various magnet combinations he wanted to experiment with. Shaw then personally wounded all the prototype Shawbucker sets in Nashville and shipped them to Corona, where they were installed in the test guitars used for testing.
Tim later flew to Corona, where he and the team spent several days listening to a wide range of test guitars. This process included swapping pickups from one instrument to another to ensure that tonal differences weren’t influenced by the guitars themselves. Since most of the structural changes planned for the new series were already defined, those elements were incorporated into the test instruments to provide an accurate representation of how they would sound in production guitars. The team also conducted A/B comparisons with American Standard models to further refine their assessments.
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Antonio Calvosa