{"id":1520,"date":"2011-12-08T12:19:59","date_gmt":"2011-12-08T12:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/?p=1520"},"modified":"2014-08-20T13:49:01","modified_gmt":"2014-08-20T12:49:01","slug":"the-salmon-pink-myth-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/?p=1520","title":{"rendered":"The ‘Salmon Pink’ Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Few things in the vintage guitar market are as confusing as the custom guitar colour often referred to as Salmon Pink.\u00a0 To understand why, you have to go back to Fender\u2019s paints of the 1950s and 60s and realize they were also the automobile paints of the time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In that era of American pop culture, rock \u2018n\u2019 roll and cars had more influence than anything else.\u00a0 Fender\u2019s 1960 colour chart reveals they often used the exact same shades of DuPont nitrocellulose lacquer as Ford and General Motors \u2026 including a Fiesta Red, shown here on a 1956 Ford Thunderbird.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Fender\u2019s guitar spraying methods weren\u2019t consistent.\u00a0 Sometimes they used an undercoat …\u00a0sometimes they simply sprayed colour directly on to bare wood, or over a previous colour that hadn\u2019t worked out.\u00a0 But they always finished off with a top coat of clear lacquer (which was also nitrocellulose based).\u00a0 But as this clear lacquer aged, it yellowed significantly and distorted the shade of the original base colour.<\/p>\n

Not only that, Fiesta Red itself turned out to be an unstable colour that was highly-reactive to the UV in sunlight and fluorescent light.\u00a0 Fender\u2019s colour charts from 1960 to present show there was never a colour called Coral Pink or Salmon Pink.\u00a0 What is often called \u2018pink\u2019\u00a0 is aged and faded Fiesta Red, where the red pigment has deteriorated towards pink or orange.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In early 1960s\u2019 Britain, due to the popularity of the Shadows, the Stratocaster guitar and the Precision bass were the guitars of choice.\u00a0 History has it that the various importers (Jennings, Selmer and Arbiter, in turn) found there was more demand for guitars that looked like Hank Marvin\u2019s red Strat than for the standard Sunburst version.\u00a0 So a lot of Fenders are believed to have been re-sprayed on arrival in the UK. It\u2019s said that the lacquer used by the importers was slightly pinker than Fender\u2019s factory colour.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When I bought the used Fender bass that I went on to use with the Attractions, it was in a sorry state \u2014 stripped back to the bare wood and fitted with a white pickguard.\u00a0 I bought a tortoiseshell replacement plate and then took the bass to Andy\u2019s Guitar Shop in Denmark Street, in London, and asked him to respray it.\u00a0 I distinctly remember asking him to do it \u2018Salmon Pink\u2019 \u2026 a term I\u2019ve always used for faded Fiesta Red.\u00a0 So, if I\u2019ve unwittingly added to the myth of Salmon Pink, then good \u2026 because I\u2019ve now made it the official colour of my new signature model Profile Bass.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few things in the vintage guitar market are as confusing as the custom guitar colour often referred to as Salmon Pink.\u00a0 To understand why, you have to go back to Fender\u2019s paints of the 1950s and 60s and realize they were also the automobile paints of the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[20,19,31,28,30,23,29],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1520"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2272,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions\/2272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}