Which of those solutions you favour is a matter of personal preference, but we can all agree they both provide easier access for neck relief tweaks than having to pop the neck off, vintage-style.įender has now gone through five generations of its Noiseless pickups but it regards the new Ultra Noiseless units as the best it has ever produced.
#TOM ANDERSON GUITARS SHORT TELECASTER SERIES#
Both guitars have Bi-Flex truss-rods with access points behind their bone nuts – dispensing with the adjustment wheel that could be found at the end of Elite series fretboards. The Telecaster’s maple ’board and the Strat’s rich rosewood slab have had their edges rolled, while the compound C-D neck carve of the Elite series has been ditched in favour of a ‘Modern D’ profile finished in a new ‘Ultra satin’ urethane. In an effort to make the American Ultras as comfortable a drive as possible, plenty of work has been done on the necks. There’s real depth to these finishes, and the Cobra Blue and bound Mocha Burst showcased by our review guitars won plenty of fans in the office. The Ultra series features a sparkling range of new metallic finishes mixed with these heavily contoured bodies in mind, with several of the colours taking on slightly different hues depending on light conditions. The Telecaster also gains a little huggability thanks to a substantial belly-cut of its own. Other body sculpting is as expected, with the Stratocaster featuring the plunging ribcage contour and forearm chamfer that Fender got so spectacularly right back in 1954. Both guitars are acoustically vibrant with a long, even decay and plenty of harmonic interest – all the right ingredients for an impressive amplified performance, but more on that later. There’s also a sizeable scoop removed from behind each guitar’s treble cutaway, which further eases the ride.ĭoes subtracting mass in this structurally important area have negative implications for tone? It certainly doesn’t seem to here. Now there’s much less bulk between your fingertips and palm when executing bends at the 22nd fret on those extended fingerboards.
So is it a case of business-as-usual out front, party in the back? Removing our review guitars from their stackable moulded hard cases reveals that the asymmetric heel idea has been carried over from the Elite series, but now the heel tapers to approximately 13mm at its thinnest point under the neck plate. The back – where it is actually worn against your body, where your hands do go when you go up high on the neck – that’s kind of the real estate where we chose to make some of those modifications.” You can look at from the front and say that’s a Stratocaster, or that’s a Telecaster. “The body of the Stratocaster and Telecaster hasn’t really manifestly been modified or changed in over 30 years and you’ve got to retain the essence and the spirit of the original mission of the instruments. “The idea of modifying the body shapes is not one that we take lightly,” he asserts. What’s less smart – if you are a leftie – is the lack of left-handed Ultra models at launch. It’s a smart move given the current omnipresence of offset-body guitars. Like the Elite series, the Ultra series includes SSS and HSS Strats and a solidbody Telecaster, but the American Elite Telecaster Thinline exits stage left and is replaced by the American Ultra Jazzmaster. With the Elites well and truly knocked off their perch, the Ultras now represent not only the most premium instruments made in Fender’s Corona facility outside of the Custom Shop, but also the most modernistic current production models.
Leo would probably have approved – he was certainly not an individual keen on standing still. Although American Elite instruments were only introduced to the catalogue at Winter NAMM 2016, at the launch of Fender’s Songs learning app in New York back in October, Fender CEO Andy Mooney explained that the company had streamlined its product lifecycle from seven to four years. For 2020, Fender’s flagship American Elite line has been superseded by a new series: American Ultra.
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