The new Jazzmaster

As promised, an entry about my newest guitar, the Fender Classic Player Jazzmaster Special. I’ve been half-heartedly looking around for a new guitar for awhile now. My beloved Les Paul’s thick tones and hot pickups—perfect for heavy, distorted rock—make getting a nice clean sound incredibly difficult, and my Strat—with its beautiful, pristine clean sound—takes quite a lot of coaxing to get an overdriven tone that’s not overly bright. What I was looking for was a guitar that sounded as good as my Strat clean, while retaining the warmth of my Les Paul when distorted, with bonus points for a slightly unconventional, yet still classic look.

After a couple of months of sporadically testing all sorts of guitars, including archtops, a plethora of Telecasters, and an SG, I tried out a dual-humbucker Fender Jaguar. I loved its looks, but its tone was totally devoid of character to my ears. The single-coil model was better, though too similar to my Strat to justify a purchase. Both suffered from really complicated controls. After mentioning this latter point to a salesperson, he brought me a Jazzmaster: a guitar that looks like a Jaguar, but with simpler controls, and tones that were a nice blend of Strat cleans and Les Paul warmth. Perfect.

This weekend, I went back to play the Jazzmaster again. After playing it for two hours and being pleased with everything I heard, I decided to buy it. Thus far, I’m having absolutely no buyer’s remorse. First of all, the guitar looks great… very rock ’n’ roll, especially with the guitar strap I picked out:

More importantly, it sounds great too. As with any new guitar, it’s taking some time to get the best tones out of it when combined with the rest of my equipment. The trouble is that the bridge pickup outputs a ton of highs, and getting that under control is proving somewhat difficult, particularly since I use the already bright Vox AC15. I think it’d be a lot easier if I could push my AC15 a bit harder, but I don’t think my ears or my neighbors would like that idea very much.

I went ahead and recorded a few doodles tonight so you could get a feel for the tone. I didn’t perform any post-recording EQ adjustments or compression, so it sounds a bit raw, but you can get an idea of what it sounds like.

• Clean fingerpicking – Here I fingerpicked some typical Prachi-esque chords, with no effects except a little reverb. There’s quite a lot of hum in this, mostly because I had my amp’s master volume set too low.
• Clean blues – This really shows off the warmth and punchiness of the Jazzmaster’s pickups.
• Overdriven crunch – A little bit of overdriven crunch. This riff was written on the spot, so pardon its banality.

Anyway, that’s the new guitar. Again, I’m still trying to figure out how to get the best tones out of the guitar through my amp and pedals, but things seem promising for now.