Frederick Theodore Tavares was born in Hawaii in 1913. He was of Chinese, Portuguese and English descent. Growing up in a family of ten children, Freddie took up music at the age of 12. His oldest brother Anthony gave Freddie a guitar right after. And soon he was showing a natural ability at excelling quickly on instruments. Some years later, he was offered to play steel guitar in a band, but he did not know how to play it but learned the parts of the songs in two weeks anyway and got the job. The Steel guitar was to become the instrument most associated with Freddie. He would later develop skills for electronics and put together his own amp eventually because commercial available amps would not give him the sound he wanted.

Soon he got married to his wife Tamar in 1937.

Dick Dale says in his interviews that Leo headhunted him from Hawaii, but i think the true story is this:

In 1942, he relocated to Anaheim, California with his family and quickly found work as a song writer and musician for TV and Radio jingles and themes. The same year he would record the Steel guitar swoop heard at the very beginning of the 'Looney Tunes' theme.

He became friends with Noel Boggs who was contributing and testing steel guitars for Fender, and in 1953, Boggs introduced Freddie to Leo. Freddie showed Leo his amp, who inspected it closely and was quite impressed with it. Leo had for a while been on the lookout for an assistant engineer to help out his busy schedule at the factory and offered Freddie the spot. He accepted.

Despite getting a job for his amp building skills, Freddie was put to work on a new guitar design that was in development. The guitar was the Fender Stratocaster that was to be released the year after. Freddie would modify its shape and design but was solely responsible for designing the Tremolo/Vibrato units it has. He eventually decided it would need larger mass, and came up the tremolo block design. The 6-screw vintage tremolo we know today is solely Freddis work. Together with Bill Carson, Dick Dale and Rex Gallion, they further worked on, and put together the Stratocaster during the rest of '53. Leo had drawn up the blueprint for it and the guitar was primarily a joint design trough all engineers and musicians, where as the Telecaster was Leo's brainchild. The Stratocaster was not aimed for any type of musician. It was simply a product to expand their solid-body guitar line.

By 1958 Leo settled that the Stratocaster had come to its final design, and Freddie would go on and help designing the Jazzmaster, Jaguar and the Fender Jazz Bass. But he also got back to building amps, and his biggest design contribution was the legendary 4x10" Bassman amplifier.

When CBS bought Fender in 1965, Freddie stayed on, yet had less influence during the CBS era. At the start of 1980, he recruited up from the Fender work-floor an enthusiastic John Page to product design. The two hit it off, and Freddie would start designing the Reissue Telecaster, when CBS sold the company to Bill Schultz. Freddie, Page and Paul Bugelski would start working hard to turn around a company that was in a disastrous decline. Bugelski was let go for Dan Smith to come aboard and build up the company. John Page would go on starting the early stages of Custom Shop and Freddie decided to retire in 1985.

Freddie would enjoy retirement for only 5 years before he died at his home in Anaheim in July 1990 at age 77. His remains was flown back to Hawaii and was buried at Nuuanu cemetery on Oahu. His brother Ernest Arriaga Tavares was also a skilled multi.-instrumentalist.

One can only imagine what the Strat would be like without him. He contributed immensely to Fender's history and legacy.