Fender Cyclone review and demo

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Following on from Bertram's piece on the Fender Cyclone II a few days ago, Guitarz reader Ben Albey has sent us this review of a Fender Cyclone 2-pickup model plus a video demo. Nice one! Over to Ben:

This is my brother in-law's 2001 Mexican made Fender Cyclone. Everything is original except one of the tuners which was replaced by a Grover, then replaced by me with an extra Fender one I had left over from my Nashville Tele when I put Sperzel tuners on. It has the original Atomic humbucker in the bridge, and Tex Mex single coil in the neck, which is really sweet because it has an angle on it that you don't see on many fender neck pickups. It's white, which by now is cream, which is a hard color to find on these Fender Cyclones, a guitar that is already hard to find.

This year of Cyclones came in Candy apple red, black, white, and vintage sunburst. I saw a black one at a music store in Tennessee when I was on my honeymoon for $300; my wife said I could get it, but we were newlyweds and hard up for cash, so I didn't buy it, and I've been kicking myself ever since. It has a Strat tremolo bridge on it, and a 24.75" scale neck. This is a strange scale for a Fender, a scale that is on Gibson Les Pauls. The guitar also features a maple neck, rosewood fretboard, tortoise shell pickguard and a Jaguar-like control plate and a three way toggle like on a Jazzmaster.

The only draw back for me is that the body is made out of poplar, which is why if you find this era of Cyclone you can probably get it for around $300-$600. Poplar is a good enough wood, and a lot of players have poplar bodies; personally I like ash and alder. Over all this is a great, fun, and comfortable guitar. If I ever find another one, I will buy it on the spot.

Ben Albey

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Thinline Fender Jaguar

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There is a Jaguar Thinline and noone ever told me!

Ach ja, it's from Fender Japan, they have much cooler Fenders there for some reason, with plenty of Mustang variations,  Teles with Filtertrons, colors you've never seen on a Fender... Check their website and cry!

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Fender Cyclone II

guitarz.blogspot.com

A couple of weeks ago Fender released its Pawn Shop Series - "guitars that never were, but should have been" (GL had posted right away about them here). This short lived Fender Cyclone II fits to the concept, isn't it? 

The Cyclone series was created in 1997 and shut down in 2007 - it never really took, probably because Fender customers just want the 3 same models again and again (same old rant, sorry).

They could have liked this one though (a Cyclone II released in 2002), nothing as radical as a Katana or a Performer, but a well thought collage of parts of various classic Fender models - the body of a Mustang with the pickups of a Jaguar slanted like on a Stratocaster, the neck, headstock and switches are also from the Jaguar, the knobs from the Mustang, the trem from a Strat... It's a pity that such alternative guitars have no room to exist, no little niche aside the mainstream models! 

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Have Fender got something right at last with the Pawn Shop Series?

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Now I'm not normally one for doing a piece on every new guitar released by one of the Big Boys in the Guitar World. I usually let the other guitar blogs cover that kind of thing whilst I continue ploughing through eBay and elsewhere for the weird and wonderful.

But, Wow! Here are some new issue Fender guitars that I'd actually want to buy. These are the Fender Pawn Shop Series dubbed in the marketing blurb as "Guitars that never were, but should have been", instruments with the "look and vibe of a modified vintage guitar and hybrid models that have never existed before".

OK, so these could be considered to be variants on existing models - indeed we on this blog have been very critical of Fender in re-issuing variants of the same guitars, mainly Stratocasters and Telecasters, over and over - but now Fender are being a little bolder with these designs, I believe.

One model which should already look familiar to us is the Fender '51, which is essentially a higher spec'd, bona fide Fender version of the Squier '51. The '51 was so-named because of its looks based on the '51 Precision Bass. I guess that the Fender '72 is likewise named after the 70s version of the same bass reissued and renamed the Telecaster Bass. The Fender '72 takes the '51 template but adds a chambered f-hole body and a neck humbucker. The other model in the series is the Mustang Special which features two Fender humbuckers and a hardtail Strat bridge.

Personally I'd love to get my mitts on a Fender '72 in surf green, which I think looks absolutely fantastic.

Thanks to Bill Cesavice on Facebook for the heads up.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Nick Rhodes' Pixelator Fender Stratocaster

guitarz.blogspot.com:

As I've said before, if we're going to show Fender Stratocasters on this blog they need to be pretty damn special - either that or particularly disgusting or amusing. This Pixelator Strat, I'm sure you'll agree, falls into the "special" category.

The brainchild of Duran Duran's keys player Nick Rhodes, this Mexican-made Fender Stratocaster has been customised by Sims Custom Shop with 100s of LEDs beneath a plexiglass top, which when controlled from a laptop (also included in the sale) allows video-streaming straight to the guitar's top, as seen in the YouTube clip below.


Currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of £5,000.

I'm reminded of Visionary Instruments' video guitars but think I prefer Nick Rhodes' system which uses a regular (albeit modified) guitar.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Fender Toronado Koa(?)

guitarz.blogspot.com:

The Fender Toronado was a relatively short-lived series of guitars produced between 1998 and 2007. The body design is Fender-ish in that it looks like a slightly chubbier version of the Jazzmaster/Jaguar, and in common with the latter model it sported a 24 3/4" scale length. Most models were produced in Mexico.

This Fender Toronado in Koa (according to the seller), currently being offered for sale with a Buy It Now of £300, is a more unusual model. It has two Seymour Duncan P90s instead of the Toronado's usual pair of Fender Atomic humbuckers. Possibly this is a US Special or Highway One USA-made variant. Is anyone out there able to more positively indentify it for us?

G L Wilson

Edit: OK, so it has a Made in Korea sticker on the back of the headstock. I missed that before. As Martin says in the comments, it could be Korean Custom Shop.

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Fender Mustang bass and guitar in Competition burgundy

guitarz.blogspot.com:

With a Buy It Now price of $3,190 each, it seems a shame that this Fender Mustang guitar and bass pair are being sold in separate eBay auctions. It seems only right, somehow, that they should be kept together and it would be a pity if they went to separate buyers. They both have the Competition stripe and are finished in burgundy which has faded over the years into a glorious blue/mauve burst.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Fender ST-Champ travel Strat with built-in amp

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Although I can imagine one or two readers groaning when they see this blog post, I make no apologies for showing you all yet another Stratocaster. Yes, the Stratocaster does seem to have a certain omnipresence to it, but one of the things I enjoy about it is the sheer number of variations on a theme that we see. Rest assured, I'm not going to blog about a bog-standard Stratocaster - we've all seen those a thousand times and more; if I'm going to blog about a Strat, it's going to be different in some way.

This particular Strat is a Fender Japan ST-Champ and I guess it would be safe to say that it represents Fender's take on the travel guitar. It has a mini-sized body although the neck appears to be full-scale, a single humbucker and an on-board amp. The ST-CHAMP is definitely not to be confused with the 3/4-scale Squier Mini with on-board amp. The difference in quality should be apparent from the photos. Having not seen one of these before, my guess is that this guitar was produced for the Japanese market only. If you know differently, I'm happy to be told otherwise!

Thanks to Keith McCreary who found this guitar on the www.ishibashi.co.jp/eng site.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Fender Electric XII

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Even those who've only been reading this blog for just a couple of months will have noticed that I have a soft spot for electric 12-strings. Here is one of the classics, the Fender Electric XII, introduced in 1965 and remaining in production for five years. The body design owes a lot to the Jazzmaster and Jaguar guitars, and the headstock is an over-sized hockey-stick shape - I can only assume so as to have somewhere prominent to display the Fender logo! (I have a Fender Strat XII and the Fender logo is somewhat lost in the middle of the small headstock that guitar has. You can imagine what an aggressive Marketing Department might think of that!)

The Electric XII was supposedly designed from the ground up to be a 12-string guitar, rather than being an adaptation of an existing 6-string guitar design. It's funny that in more recent years Fender have resorted to issusing the 12-string Stratocaster instead of this beauty. However, I'm sure the Custom Shop would knock one up for someone willing to throw the right amount of money in their direction.

The distinctive-looking split pickups are selected via a 4-way switch offering settings for neck, neck and bridge in series, neck and bridge in parallel and bridge only options.

It's funny, everyone thinks of the Gibson doubleneck as being the "Stairway to Heaven" guitar, but on the recorded version on "Led Zeppelin 4" (or "Four Symbols" if you will!) it was a Fender Electric XII that Jimmy Page used for the 12-string parts. The guitar has also been used by, amongst others, Lou Reed, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend and Bob Dylan (pictured right).

See here also for a rare left-handed version. (Well, I'd never seen one before!)

The above-pictured black example is a refurbished Electric XII and is currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of £1,850.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Fender HMT Bass

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Guitarz reader Ryan Coons saw this on Craigslist and commented, "I've seen my share of Fender basses, but nothing quite like this one."

It's a Made in Japan Fender HMT Bass circa 1989/90, has an F-hole in a Thinline-inspired P-Bass body, an active TBX tone control and a piezo pickup in the fixed acoustic-style bridge. Very unusually for a Fender, it doesn't sport their trademark headstock shape or familiar logo. The name "HMT" and the headstock shape would imply "Heavy Metal", but the f-fole and acoustic pickup/bridge do not quite fit in with this image.

I remember around this period at a music show in London seeing a similar Fender bass, but fretless and with the more usual P-Bass headstock and in natural finish. I guess that was a Japanese-built sibling of the bass we see here. That one I could understand. This one seems to have identity issues.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

You can never have too many necks

guitarz.blogspot.com:


I bet you thought was going to be about one of those Rick Nielson multi-neck Cheap Shot guitars eh? I should coco! This is something I haven't come across too often before. Fender is a company I don't readily associate with doubleneck guitars. In fact I don't think I've knowingly seen any before - not that I've been looking, I have to add. The only Fenderish doubleneck I've happened across recently is the handsome, though not actually from Fender per se, creation from the skilful hands of young Bertram (with a little help from one of his woodworking associates). We have a fondness for the Fender Bass VI here in Guitarzland so it's an even bigger delight to find one Siametically co-joined to another of our favourites - the Fender Jazzmaster.

It's on the Austrian eBay site and I don't speak German. Maybe Bertram can help out with some of the details. As far as I can make out, it's a newish - 2010 - model, one-off, masterbuilt by Dennis Galuska (who's probably famous - sorry Den, not terrible au fait with the world of Lutherie) for the Frankfurt Musicmesse 2010 (that's a bit unfortunate isn't it, Musicmesse? Not really encouraging, eh? Probably means fair, exhibition or show or something similar. Maybe we should let them know. Might improve attendance a bit).

By the way, the body is lightweight ash with maple necks and rosewood fingerboards with Nitrocellulose lacquer - NOS (I thought that meant New Old Stock. Probably something else in German).

Amazingly enough (to me at least) it seems Yngwie Malmsteen also played a Fender double-neck 12/6 (probably very fast and very proficiently). That sounded a bit sarcastic didn't it? At least he's not Steve Vai. No, I didn't mean it. OK, YM isn't really my cup of tea, I'll admit, but until this week I'd have said the same about Steve Vai. Until... I Youtubed some of his performances and was a little surprised. Maybe it's a big act, I don't know, but he seems a nice guy, a great showman, a big ham, doesn't take himself too seriously (for a rock star) and plays with a ferocious passion. I'm not gonna rush out and buy his back catalogue but I don't mind anyone knowing I now have one of his tracks on my iPod - the Crazy Horses/Edgar Winter tinged-one-riff-all-the-way-through "Bad Horsie". It's only Rock N Roll etc... Stupid faces and all.

Anyway, Happy New Year to all. Taken my own sweet time to get back into second gear this year, sorry all.

David in Barcelona where the weather isn't too bad although it's a bit soon for the beach.

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

1983 Fender Telecaster Elite in Stratoburst finish

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's another 1980s guitar with a loud two-tone finish. It's a Fender Telecaster Elite model in supposedly rare "Stratoburst" from the end of Fender's CBS-owned period. The USA-made Elites were only made during 1983-84, and there was also a Japanese-made 22-fret neck edition offered in late 1984.

Other than its iconic silhouette, the Tele Elite has no other traditional Tele features. Pickups are active humbuckers with a TBX guitar expander and a MDX midrange booster allowing 12dB of gain. The controls are laid out in an almost Les Paul fashion (indeed, some Tele Elites also sported a very Les Paul-esque pickguard), and other features include Fender's BiFlex trussrod system and a Freeflyte hardtail bridge.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Mike Oldfield's Red Fender Stratocaster

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Gef has emailed to tell about his Fender Strat, a guitar with a history having had a famous owner:

This guitar is a Fender Stratocaster from 1963 and was one of Mike Oldfield’s favourite guitars. He bought it in 1984 and sold it in December 2007. He used it on 15 albums during this era, the most famous one being "Tubular Bells II" and he used this guitar during the great World Premiere of this album in Edinburgh in 1992.

He used it for the very last time in Antwerp during the rehearsals of The Night of the Proms in 2006. Unfortunately, he didn’t play it during the concerts in Germany. It was the last time we saw Mike Oldfield with this wonderful guitar.

Mike has often said that this guitar “was his favourite one” alongside another, his current PRS 24.

Thanks for that! It's good to know that this guitar is still being cherished.

If any other readers have a guitar with a story to tell, please do get in touch!

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Alvino Rey (and not to mention Stringy the talking steel guitar!)

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's an email from Alan:

Hello from Washington DC USA.

Two slick videos I wanted to tell you about featuring Alvino Rey - a steel guitarist popular from the '40s thru the '60s. One (see above) features "Stringy", a singing puppet fronting for a vocalist going through a Sonovox. Bands of the 1940s routinely did these early "music videos" that ran in movie theaters.

The fun starts around the 0:42 sec mark.

The second shows Alvino on the "King Family" TV show of the 1960s - a very safe, family-friendly music variety show of that era. What makes it cool is seeing Alvino slinging a state of the art Fender solid-body instead of a nice, dignified archtop jazzbox; almost a blasphemy on a "family" TV show such as this.

In black and white it's hard to tell what the actual color of this guitar is. Since TV of that era couldn't handle *pure* white (it would blow the picture out), I want to pretend it's a Lake Placid Blue, an Ivory, or some kinda yellow.

Enjoy.
-AP

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1978 Fender Bronco

guitarz.blogspot.com

In the comments about the Musicmaster, Greg praises the Fender Bronco and I have to admit that I've never heard of this guitar until then (my indifference toward Fender guitars is slowly fading away though...) 

Luckily I just found this one currently offered for sale on eBay.de, and it does have this cool tremolo that looks much more convincing than the stratocaster one (I say 'look', I didn't put my hands on it, and if I did, I'd probably not really know what to do with it - the best use of a trem bar I ever did was to create extreme detuning effect with a Floyd Rose...)

But let's go back to the Bronco: a short-scale student guitar baring a single pickup in bridge position, it belonged to the Mustang series, and like the other 60s Fender cheapos, it turned into a semi-cult guitar, because, you know, Leo couldn't be wrong, ever.

It's lucky that Fender stopped then naming their guitars after horses: after Mustang and Bronco, if they would have followed the American horses theme, the next one would probably have been Appaloosa, but if the topic was feral horses, they should have used Przewalski. 

Bertram


Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1966 Fender Musicmaster II

guitarz.blogspot.com

We already showed a Musicmaster here but this one is in a particularly good state that allows to consider it like a playable guitar and not a relicked museum piece... And it's an attractive little guitar with its Mustang body (actually the Musicmaster came first and the Mustang design is a slight variation, but this one is a Musicmaster II that re-uses the updated Mustang body - is it clear? It also has the regular Fender scale and not the 3/4 one of the previous version - the Musicmaster was a student budget guitar with one single coil pickup [with two pickups it's a Duo-sonic]), its minimal hardware and its big sexy CBS headstock.

Bertram

[Please see also this previous post where we examined the differences between the various Musicmaster, DuoSonic and Mustang models - G L Wilson]

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Fender Lead II from 1980 - refinished

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Ivo Campos from Brazil writes:

"...thats my 1980 Fender Lead II refinished with Fender Lace Sensor Gold vintage pickups. 'She' was refinished by a friend, a Brazilian luthier called Corellio Rosa, one young genius. Originally was translucent red, but when I bought was metallic blue... terrible. The body is Ash and has a solid maple neck."

Thanks for letting us see your guitar, Ivo. It's good to see some more of these "forgotten" Fenders. The Lead series were produced at Fender's Fullerton, California plant from 1979 through to 1982, and - as Fender's "budget" range instruments - were superseded by the Fender Squier JV series made in Japan, which sadly meant more Strats and more Teles and less "new" designs from Fender.

The Lead series comprised three models. The Lead I had a single humbucker in the bridge position whilst the Lead II had two single coils (Ivo's Lead II as seen here has been upgraded with three pickups). The Lead III model with two humbuckers made a brief appearance in the series' final year of production.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Clarence White's 1968 Fender Telecaster B-Bender prototype

guitarz.blogspot.com:

'Here is Clarence White's 1968 Fender Telecaster with original string pitch bender prototype as purchased from him in the early 1970s. An incredible piece of the early history of Clarence White and the invention that later became the "Parsons White String Pull", and then more commonly known as the "b-bender".'

We've looked at B-Benders before here on Guitarz, but this one would appear to be the one that started it all. Note the external mechanism and the false back. This is a fantastic museum piece and an important part of guitar history!

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Fender Custom Shop Strat/Tele hybrid

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This is a Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster/Telecaster hybrid masterbuilt by Yuriy Shishkov, and is one of only 10 guitars of this design. This stunning example, finished in emerald green on body, neck and fingerboard, is currently being offered for sale on eBay in the UK with a Buy It Now price of £3,200.

A similar example, with not quite such a stunning finish, is also being offered for sale with slightly less hefty Buy It Now price of £2,600.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1962 Fender Stratocaster electric guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

After the recent post on the completely stripped 59/65 Fender "Sonic Master"...
We have a completely stripped Stratocaster, with probably the most understated eBay listing I've seen for a pre CBS Strat in a looooooong time. And no sign of exclamation marks except to say "We only accept PAYPAL! ". Which is great, really.

The only pity is the lack of detail in the listing. I quote...

"The guitar has had the finish stripped.
There is light play wear on the body.
There is some surface rust on the body.
All electronics work".

That's it. There is no more.

I'm not a big Strat fan and in fact only own one Fender guitar (the FR48) but seeing this cheeky little number stripped to the wood, I'm kind of warming to them.

I've posted about guitars from these guys before. They claim to be nothing more than buyers and know nothing about guitars per se. However they do have a knack of coming up with some tasty vintage guitars - They have some very sweet lap steels at the moment - so well worth putting on the "favourite sellers" list. The only down side (for me) is they're in the US of A and that always means you have to factor in the shipping (which isn't that bad, considering) and the totally unpredictable import duty which can really mount up.

Stop Press: For those of you wondering about the date...

I just got this email from them.

"According to the serial #81987. The guitar dater project says its 1962". 2112Jefferson
Thanks Jefferson.

I don't normally edit posts once they're up but, in case anyone is in doubt... I think this is a CRACKING guitar and if I could afford it, I'd be glad to have it hanging over my rotund, middle aged belly.

David in Barcelona

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!