Fender Jazzmaster

Together with the Jaguar Fender’s most beautiful guitar of all time. Actually I know very little about the vintage Jazzmasters, since I don’t own one and nor does any of my friends. I prefer the Jaguar a bit more in looks, because of the metal plates and I prefer short scale guitars. The Jaguar is short scale, the Jazmaster is long scale, that’s the main difference for me. I rang a vintage one a few times at trade show and acoustically it sounds pretty similar to a stratocaster, where a jaguar sounds more like a mustang. Not so strange. Both guitars have in an amplified situation the string resonance effect coming from the tailed string bridge section, which gives them their typical ‘Sonic Youth’ sparkling sound. The Jaguar has this more prominent, since the string ratio inbetween both section is more equal, raising the overtone humming and lowering the pitch of the overtones. The jaguar however has a lower string tension and a good solution for not jumping of the string is using a heavier gauge set of strings, like for instance 0.13.

The typical body shape of the jazzmaster is called offset, which is a kind of a fashion occuring in the history of guitar building. Popular in the sixies, very out of fashion in the seventies and early 80s, until Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and J. Mascis became known for using them and the model became a very desired object again for its beauty. The influence of these bands was that big, Fender could re-introduce the model and it was taken back in production. In 2007 a J.Mascis signature edition came out, in 2009 Lee Ranaldo and Thurson Moore got their own versions, read here my story about Sonic Youth’s Fender Jazzmasters.

The site in the external link gives very accurate descriptions of the history of the jazzmaster. No need to copy that info, since it is allready there.

External links

jimshine.com/jazzmaster/intricacies_of_the_fender_jazzmaster

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