October. The leaves are changing to their usual reds and browns, the days are getting shorter, the crisp autumn breeze wakes you up on your morning commute. As the clock winds down on another year, Russo Music's sixty-fifth anniversary starts wrapping up. 2025 marked our sixty-fifth year as a family-owned company. For such an occasion, we called on a number of our friends to make some custom and exclusive guitars, pedals, and more to join in on the celebration.
Here, we're introducing the closing act. Straight from our friends on the wild West Coast, we have two Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilt models of our very own.
Shop the FCS Russo Music 60 Strat
Shop the FCS Russo Music 60 Tele
Masterfully Done
Closing out 2025, we have a Fender Custom Shop '60 Stratocaster and ‘60 Telecaster Custom Masterbuilt by Fender Master Builder Dennis Galuszka. These two Customs were built to encapsulate our unique take on each model with plenty of considerations for playability, tone, and our own East Coast flavor. Concerning quality, Galuszka’s personal touch and craftsmanship manifests across each model as he attempts to spoil whoever crosses their path and plugs them in.
"Immediately when you pick it up, I think it's gonna feel expensive to you. It's gonna feel like, 'Well all my other guitars are ruined now, I can't play those.' That's my goal and I think these will do that." - Fender Master Builder Dennis Galuszka
Our Masterbuilt Fender Custom Shop '60 Stratocaster and ‘60 Telecaster Custom have a number of elements in common tying them together. Throwing it back to some landmarks of Fender history while hitting some modern enhancements along the way, our Masterbuilt Fender Custom Shops are meant to encapsulate what we find so compelling about each model.
Each of our Masterbuilt Fenders uses a roasted pine body as its tonewood. Heat-treated to bring out some added aesthetic depth and tonal complexity, both bodies exhibit some fine graining and are sorted for weight for an exceptionally comfortable feel with plenty of resonance. Both Custom Shops are fitted with quartersawn roasted maple necks in smooth 60 Style Oval "C" profiles that also exhibit tight, defined grains alongside satin lacquer finishes. Each neck is paired with a AAA rosewood fingerboard measuring to a modern-feeling 9.5" radius with Medium Jumbo 6150 frets.
Tonally, our Masterbuilt Fenders summon expressive and iconic single-coil sounds through hand-wound pickups. Our Telecaster Custom features two hand-wound Tele single-coils, a Loaded 51 Nocaster and 50-51 Blackguard Tele, for exceptional Tele twang. Its Stratocaster sibling is loaded with three hand-wound Strat pickups – two Fat '60s and one Tomatillo – made by none other than the illustrious Josefina Campos. Each model is fitted with a Tone Saver treble bleed to retain signal clarity at any setting.
Finally, these Customs get topped off with a number of aesthetic appointments. Among them: Matching finished headcaps, body binding on the Tele, and Dennis Galuszka signature-stamped neck plates. The collective showstopper we'd say, if we could be so bold, are the models' Heavy Relic lacquer finish treatments. Faded Aged Eden Green lacquer wraps each model as they are treated to Galuszka's personal Heavy Relic treatment as inspired by one Asbury Park image in particular: the Wonder Bar "Tillie" mural. This seafoam-shaded icon served as the inspiration for our Aged Eden Green color and the Relic process, where Galuszka approached the wear as if the guitars were somehow part of the Tillie mural.
"With this particular order, because the sign was so cool-looking, I wanted it to look like these guitars were either hanging from the sign all these years or had something to do with it." - Fender Master Builder Dennis Galuszka
Somewhere That's (Aged Eden) Green
This year of partying has brought us quite a couple memorable anniversary pieces. To close out our 2025 and turn the page on sixty-five years, these Fender Custom Shops are truly something special. Here's to sixty-six!
