« Mellow sounding Fender »

This is part of Fenders new line called the Blacktop series. All of the guitars in the Blacktop Series feature Dual Alnico humbucking pickups. All of the guitars have a warmer sound than their single coil counterparts. This guitar is the Jaguar based Blacktop model. The Jaguar was originally designed as a Jazzmaster variant with a shorter scale neck. They were designed as improvements on the Stratocaster design but they never reached the popularity the Stratocaster did. The original guitars featured a strange tremolo system Leo Fender designed. Leo Fender believed that this new design was superior to previous designs since the bridge actually moved backwards and forwards along with the strings during tremolo use, thereby maintaining proper intonation even under duress, and preventing strings from binding. This floating bridge concept was also later used on the Fender Mustang. The floating tremolo mechanism also features a built-in tremolo lock, which helped the player preserve the guitar's tuning in the event of a string breakage and easing removal of the tremolo arm. This design was very complicated and was one reason these guitars never became popular. This Blacktop model features an alder body with a Gibson style Tune-o-matic bridge. It has the tradtional 24 inch scale neck with a large 70s style headstock. The neck has 22 medium jumbo frets and a modern 9.5 radius fretboard. With this flatter fretboard you can get a lower action than you could on any vintage Jaguar. It has single volume and tone knobs and has a 3 way toggle switch pickup selector that moves left to right instead of up and down. Due to the shorter scale length and humbucking pickups this guitar sounds very mellow compared to a normal Fender guitar. The sound would be good for jazz and blues. Because of the short scale it does not take to lower tunings well. The short scale already provides a looser string tension so when you tune down the tension becomes almost unusably loose. I think Fenders Blacktop series is very cool. I prefer humbuckers when I play but I love all of the Fender designs. So with these guitars you can get harder sounds on the classic Fender designs.