Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

Pretty self-explanatory
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sweetest punch
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Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.electric-guitar-review.com/2 ... azzmaster/

Fender Developing Elvis Costello Signature Jazzmaster

Wow… 2007 is really turning into a hell of a year for those of us whose taste in guitar players runs a bit shy of the mainstream. Not only did we see Fender’s introduction of the Joe Strummer Telecaster and J. Mascis Jazzmaster, but it would appear that an Elvis Costello Signature Jazzmaster is now in the works as well.

There’s not a whole lot of information available at this time, but I can safely say that the instrument will be based on the vintage Jazzmaster that Costello so famously posed with on his ‘77 debut album My Aim Is True.

Other specs are purely speculation at this point, but the guitar appears to sport a standard pair of Fender “soapbarâ€
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sweetest punch
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Re: Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

Post by sweetest punch »

New Jazzmaster for sale here:
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/JazzMasterEC/

http://www.electric-guitar-review.com/2 ... azzmaster/

It’s Finally Official: Fender Reveals Elvis Costello Signature Jazzmaster Cary Apr 11th

Well, after all but flat-out denying it for many months, Fender this week has finally revealed on its website the highly anticipated Signature Series Elvis Costello Jazzmaster… and just when I thought it was safe to put away my wallet.

According to Fender, while Costello’s original Jazzmaster has seen numerous modifications over its 30-plus years in existence, this new Signature Model was built to replicate the guitar as it was during the recording of Costello’s seminal 1977 debut LP (and still my favorite of all his records,) My Aim Is True.

Unique features are expected to include a Walnut stained finish in Nitrocellulose Lacquer, early ’70s neck design, and a “loose-set” tremolo tension with the trem arm bent away from the body to allow for more dramatic travel.

The Elvis Costello Jazmmaster will also sport an Alder body, Maple C-shaped neck (25.5“ scale length,) Rosewood fretboard with vintage 7.25” radius and 21 frets, vintage style “floating” tremolo w/tremolo lock button, Fender/Gotoh vintage style machine heads, 4-ply tortoise shell pickguard, chrome hardware, and aged white plastic parts.

Electronics will include a pair of special design American Vintage Jazzmaster single-coils, “lead circuit” Volume & Tone controls, “rhythm circuit” Volume & Tone controls, 3-way pickup switching, and a 2-position slide for selecting Lead & Rhythm tone settings.

The Fender Signature Series Elvis Costello Jazzmaster will ship with a Deluxe brown hardshell case, guitar strap, and cable. In keeping with other recent low-cost Signature models, the guitar is selling for a street price of just over $1500.

Image
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sweetest punch
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Re: Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

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Elvis talks about his Jazzmaster
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=fmW8uK1N8wk
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Otis Westinghouse
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Re: Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

Nice clip! Elvis seems to enjoy indulging in this guitar talk. You get the impression he could monologue for 2 hours at the drop of a hat.
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Re: Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

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johnfoyle
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Re: Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 40228.html

Guitar hero: Anniversary of the Fender Jazzmaster

The Fender Jazzmaster, lesser-known brother of the more famous Stratocaster, is 50.

Andy Gill salutes one of rock's oddities

Tuesday, 23 September 2008

Four years ago, a line-up of stellar guitar heroes – among them Hank Marvin, Jeff Beck, Dave Gilmour, Phil Manzanera and Joe Walsh – assembled at Wembley Arena for a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster, the most iconic of solid-bodied electric guitars. It was a revolutionary design, light and strong, with the futuristic curved "horns" of the guitar's body conveying a wildness and fluidity that echoed the era's trends in car design, while also contributing to the player's ease and comfort. As Walsh explained: "The upper horn keeps the strap out of your business, and the lower horn cutaway enables you to play really high on the neck. I don't know how Leo Fender knew to do all that. You'd think that they'd start out with a primitive guitar and then improve upon it, but nobody's been able to."

It didn't stop Fender trying. Four years later, his company unveiled its new top-of-the-range model, the Jazzmaster, an attempt to lure jazz players away from the hollow-bodied archtop guitars they had always favoured for what was considered their tonal superiority and cleanliness of sound. The problem with the classic "jazz boxes" – apart from the steep cost of such craftsman-built instruments – was their tendency to feed back at higher volumes, which meant that jazz guitarists weren't able to effect the exciting dynamic transitions of horn players. Instead of emulating a saxophonist's sudden swoop from a whisper to scream, the guitarist could deliver only on one level, which, along with the general preference in jazz for the undistorted, uninflected "clean" sound, left them behind as the genre grew more outlandish and exploratory in the Fifties. Most jazz guitarists still played sitting down, and their impact was similarly stationary compared with the thrilling exploits of the free-jazzers.

Spotting a gap in the market, Fender tried to get a jump on his rivals at Gibson by designing a solid-body guitar that was less inclined to feed back at high volume, but which offered a warmer, less "pointy" tone than the Stratocaster and its predecessor, the Telecaster. To this end, he fitted the distinctive white, wide, flat-wound pick-ups that became known as "soapbars", which provided an ideal combination of warmth, clarity and mellowness tailored to fit jazzers' musical needs.

The body was likewise tailored to fit jazz musicians' physical needs, by incorporating an "offset waist" design that was more comfortable for a sitting player to use. Where the Strat's upper horn would have been poking into his gut, on the Jazzmaster it was flattened a little and shunted further over to the left, while the lower curve was designed to sit naturally on the thigh. The lower horn was also truncated, still enabling easy access high up the neck, but less likely to poke into the player's other thigh. To accommodate these design touches, the Jazzmaster's "hips" – the bottom of the body, as it sits on its stand – were wider than the Strat's, and to musicians now familiar with the Strat, it may have seemed a bit bulky.

It's impossible to know why now, but the Jazzmaster never found favour with its intended audience; jazz guitarists stubbornly stuck to their old archtop jazz boxes. So when a similar 50th anniversary concert was staged to celebrate the Jazzmaster earlier this month, it was held not at a big arena, but at New York's small avant-garde showcase venue The Knitting Factory; and instead of the high-profile, mainstream axe-heroes involved in the Stratocaster concert, it featured a new-wave/indie line-up that included Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis, Television's Tom Verlaine, and Nels Cline of Wilco. Clearly, somewhere along the way, the Jazzmaster had found its natural constituency – ironically, one that eagerly incorporated the kind of sonic experimentation that might have enabled jazz guitarists to keep pace with the spacey sonic explorations of their horn- and keyboard-playing colleagues, instead of getting stuck in the past, sound-wise.

Many of its later adherents stumbled across the Jazzmaster almost by accident, often as a substitute for a more expensive Stratocaster. Elvis Costello can perhaps be credited with restoring the Jazzmaster's credibility when it had slipped so far out of favour that Fender had ceased manufacturing it. Indeed, it's a Jazzmaster Costello's cradling in the iconic legs-akimbo pose on the cover of his debut album My Aim Is True. Unlike J Mascis, he chose it over more stylish Fenders.

"The first guitar I had was a Telecaster. It had a terrible action, the strings were so high in the factory setting, it was really hard to play, and I was so naive that I didn't realise they could be adjusted! The first sessions for My Aim Is True were done with that guitar, then one day I was walking through Hounslow when I came across a Jazzmaster hanging in a shop window. I had never seen a guitar like it – I thought it was a Strat that somebody had cut a bit off! I went in and tried it out, and it certainly played better than the Telecaster I had, so I traded in my new guitar for this one that I had no idea about – it just seemed like an opportunity I shouldn't overlook.

Although the Jazzmaster failed to convince its target market of jazz guitarists, it found a ready constituency amongst the burgeoning surf-guitar community. Leo Fender had actively involved surf-guitar king Dick Dale in the design of the Strat, and when the Jazzmaster appeared, it was enthusiastically adopted by The Ventures, the hugely influential and innovative early-Sixites instrumental group behind hits such as "Walk Don't Run", "Perfidia" and "Slaughter On Tenth Avenue", who were the first to incorporate effects such as fuzz-distortion and flanging into their sound.

Other guitarists, less pleased with the Jazzmaster's peculiarities, have made ad-hoc alterations to suit their playing style. Few have gone as far as Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo has in customising their guitars. "When Sonic Youth started back in the early Eighties, we had one really good guitar, which was a Fender Tele Deluxe," he explains. "I always loved that guitar for the pickups that were in it. Then around 1987 or 88, someone sold us a Jazzmaster, and we liked it immediately. I sort of combined the best of both worlds, by taking the pick-ups out of my Tele Deluxe and putting them into the Jazzmaster, to create what we call the Jazzblaster. Thurston [Moore] goes more for the brighter Jazzmaster sound, while I'm really into the thickness of these Telecaster humbuckers. It's become the ultimate guitar for us: Thurston and I must each have somewhere between six and ten that we use. There's something about the body-shape, the way it straps on, the way it fits when you're sitting down with it – it seems like the perfect shape for a guitar; I find it so much more comfortable than any other guitar, both for playing and for looking pretty cool."

The Jazzmaster has slipped in and out of fashion, depending on the promotional boosts afforded by high-profile players. Each time a Kurt Cobain or Thom Yorke strapped on a Jazzmaster, dealers probably added a hundred pounds to the price of their secondhand stock. Following its first boom in the wake of The Ventures' huge successes, its appeal faded as Lennon's Rickenbacker, Clapton, Beck and Hendrix's Stratocasters, Page's Les Paul and Springsteen's Telecaster became the must-have guitars for teens wielding tennis racquets in front of mirrors. But with the patronage of Costello, Television, J Mascis, Sonic Youth, Robert Smith of The Cure, and more recently My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields, the ugly-duckling Jazzmaster has earned a reputation as the explorer's guitar, its unique combination of features offering an unequalled range of sonic experimentation, from the flat, warm, mellow tone it was originally designed to produce, to its various forms of feedback and distortion.

"I always come back to it," says Costello. "I've done all sorts of different music, but whenever it's involved an electric guitar, I don't think there's one record I've made on which the Jazzmaster doesn't figure somewhere. It's a brutal-sounding guitar – it suits the way I play!"
johnfoyle
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Re: Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

Post by johnfoyle »

This blog details some technical problems with the E.C. Telemaster -

http://tomsguitarservice.blogspot.com/2 ... berry.html
scamp
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Re: Fender develops EC Jazzmaster

Post by scamp »

Thanks, Cool link. We lived near Jacksonville, N.C. til I was eight.
johnfoyle
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