Pulling a Few Strings in the Guitar Industry : Don Lace’s invention has revolutionized a line of Fender instruments. His sensor helps create sustained notes and better tones for musicians.

An electric guitar works like this: Pluck a string, and a field created by a little magnet underneath is disturbed by the vibrations. Wire wound around the magnet translates the vibrations into an electronic signal that can be boosted so it comes out of a guitar amplifier loud .

The basic technology has been around for half a century. But guitarists are always trying to coax bigger, fatter, nastier tones out of their instruments, so guitar makers are always tinkering with their electronics. How far have they come? Think back to the 1950s and the thin, rickety sound of the guitar on Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” Now think of the grunts, groans and screams all those guitarists with the leather and the big hair wrench from their instruments today.

A few years ago, Fender Musical Instruments Corp. needed new gizmos to spruce up the company’s product line. Fender was once the world’s best-known maker of electric guitars and amplifiers. But it got a black eye after it was sold in the 1960s to CBS; the quality of the guitars that the TV network made was widely perceived to be inferior to the old instruments.

In 1985, CBS finally gave up and sold the company--at a loss--to its managers. Fender needed some new product, something unique, to jazz up its tarnished image.

And that’s where Don Lace came in. Lace was an inventor; one of his innovations was a new type of guitar pickup. Instead of the conventional pickup--usually six small magnets like shiny pegs pointing up at the strings--Lace’s pickups had only two metal strips hidden neatly under a thin plastic casing.

The Lace pickup--he preferred to call it a “sensor”--put out a wider electromagnetic field (the thing that senses the string’s vibrations.) That meant that there was less magnetic pull on the string, which meant a player could sustain notes longer and get better tones.

“The guy walked through the door and had something that seemed to be light-years ahead of where we were,” said Dan Smith, a Fender vice president. Smith is one of the dozen or so managers CBS brought in from Japanese instrument-maker Yamaha in the early 1980s.

Those managers had been talking to Lace even before the buyout. “It took us another year of work to get that certain Fender sound out of the pickup,” said Donald A. Lace Jr. He has been president of the small company with the fancy moniker that his father founded--Actodyne General Inc.--since the elder Lace died last year.

The new relationship paid off for both companies when the pickups finally came out in 1987. Five years later, Actodyne, based in Huntington Beach, was doing almost $2 million worth of business--most of it selling pickups to Fender.

The distinctive-looking pickups go on about a fifth of Fender guitars. In a good year, that’s as many as 30,000 guitars, Lace said. And they’re Fender’s better, more expensive instruments, the ones that go for $850 and up. Rocker Eric Clapton uses them; so does blues man Buddy Guy; so does country player James Burton.

In fact, one of the nice things about being president of Actodyne is that Lace, who is 34 and a guitar player, got to meet Clapton--”my favorite musician”--backstage. He’s also met Buddy Guy. Lace’s sister, who is also in the company, keeps in touch with the technician Clapton employs to keep track of his guitars.

Lace’s brother does much of the engineering, and his mother manages the office. Everyone takes the same salary.

It’s fitting that Actodyne is based in Orange County, for this collection of suburbs famous mostly for its conservatism is also one of the most important places in the short history of the electric guitar.

Leo Fender, who died two years ago at 81, founded Fender in his garage here in 1950, only to sell it to CBS 15 years later and become one of the first people to get really rich from rock ‘n’ roll.

The company’s headquarters, coincidentally, left the county for Scottsdale, Ariz., a few months after his death. (A plant remains in Corona.) Fender says it is doing pretty well these days: It sold more than $100 million worth of guitars and amplifiers last year, way up from the $21 million in sales it did in its last year under CBS.

The company is profitable, it says, even with the load of debt it took on in the leveraged buyout from CBS. (Rickenbacker International Corp., Orange County’s other big guitar company--which claims credit for inventing the first practical electric guitar--remains in Santa Ana.)

What’s next for Actodyne? Dealing with the same problem faced by many small companies with a single customer: how to diversify. Sitting on seven or eight patents from the elder Lace, including the sensors, the company is looking for ways to use all that technology. One possibility is attaching sensors to bridges so they can measure stress levels and warn of impending failures.

But it’s clearly the guitar pickups that are keeping the Laces in vintage guitars (they own 100 or so). Not bad for a business that started when Don Lace Sr. tried out his newfangled pickup on an old, cheap guitar he bought at a yard sale.