Super Sonic
One of the boldest guitar launches in recent times, Fender’s Acoustasonic Telecaster got many in a lather. But its sales were strong enough to warrant this new Stratocaster version. We talk innovation with co-designer Tim Shaw
If the soothsayers and experts of the social media world had their way, Fender’s 2019 launch of the Acoustasonic Telecaster would be erased from history, consigned to the ‘What Were They Thinking?’ lists. It was quickly dismissed as ‘ugly’, ‘too expensive’… ‘just plain wrong!’ Thankfully, that snapshot is not the real world, and 12 months on a Stratocaster joins the Acoustasonic ranks.
“The Acoustasonic Telecaster vastly exceeded our expectations,” beams Tim Shaw, one of the Fender design team responsible for the Tele model and the new Strat version, at this year’s NAMM Show. “I think one thing is that you give the Acoustasonic Tele to three players and they’ll all approach it differently. There are plenty of online user videos that illustrate that. I think that’s when we realised it was – it is! – a legitimate platform: it’s its own thing. So, no, this is not a D-28 perfectly amplified in a studio with a $700 microphone. But this is a really good tool. You can take it on a bar gig and get more than enough sounds. You can sit at your computer and play through songs, write. Some of the looper people, it’s amazing how much stuff they put on there. But I’ll agree, initially nobody knew what it was.
“I think one of the things that surprised us was Jack White,” Tim adds. “He’s taken his Acoustasonic Tele, which he customised the heck out of, and we helped, and he’s using that thing with a Big Muff. He’s totally embraced it. To watch people take this thing and abuse it, in the classic sense, is great.”
But then there was the price, which (bearing in mind we’re talking about a lot of costly R&D and a USA build) seemed pretty bang-on to us when we reviewed the Tele back in issue 445.
“Well, I’ve never understood that,” says Tim. “Just look at that PCB!”
Indeed, the Acoustasonic platform itself involves all sorts of trickery, which Fender prefers to downplay.
“What you hear from the output jack is 55 per cent from the guitar and analogue circuit, and 45 per cent shaped by the electronics,” we were told of the original Acoustasonic Telecaster by co-designer Brian Swerdfeger. “There are no ‘simulations’ or ‘models’ – just the real guitar being voiced by powerful filters to achieve the different performance experiences.
The tones we crafted are informed by our collective musical experience but not targeted to any specific instruments.”
You might imagine doing this second version would be straightforward, but the key to both designs is how the small hollowbody guitar sounds acoustically.
“So, yes, the body shapes are different, but we’re still trying to optimise what Brian and myself refer to as the ‘OLE’: the on-lap-experience,” continues Tim. “So much of this thing – the playing experience – is actually dependent on what the guitar sounds like: the guitar has to work as efficiently and pleasantly as it can.
“So, although the body is actually slightly bigger than the Telecaster, internally,” Tim explains, “because of the belly cut and the fact that the cut-out in the body doesn’t go up the horns, we actually have less airspace in the body than on the Telecaster version. It’s a smaller chamber, which means we had to tune the sound port – the ‘doughnut’ – differently. I went through three different iterations of that before I got something I wanted to play. Until the structure was correct we couldn’t do anything else, and getting that right took a little while.
“That said, the bracing [of the Sitka spruce top] is pretty much the same [as the Tele]. In fact, the raw bracing pieces are the same parts. See, the Strat and Tele are pretty much the same length.”
Along with more electric voices on this new Strat, the placement of the magnetic bridge pickup was crucial.
“The placement of the bridge pickup here is exactly the same as it is on a Stratocaster – same angle and same distance from the nut, nominally 95 per cent of the scale length. That’s where people expect to hear things on a Strat, and if I’m trying to get something that electrically will function like a Strat – not withstanding the fact that everything else is very different! – I’ll take what I can get and I’ll put things where they should be as much as I possibly can,” Tim explains.
As we explain in our review, this Strat has some different voices – acoustic and electric – compared with its Tele sibling.
“There’s no reason whatsoever to make the same set of voices in just a different box,” Tim tells us. “The world doesn’t need that. If the main pretext we have in playing different instruments is because they make us play different stuff, expand us as musicians, then we might as well have a set of voices here that are valid but different. As we were pretty happy with what we did on the Telecaster version, it was incumbent on us not to screw this up and still create something that people wanted to play: ‘Okay, I thought I knew everything about this,’ or ‘I was played out. I was wrong: there’s something cool I can do with this.’”
So this revoicing was presumably easier than voicing the first Telecaster version?
“No, this was worse! Let’s just say we’d learned a bunch, so there were things we knew how to do and doing the Telecaster collectively taught us a tremendous amount. But, again, we had that looking over our shoulder. Larry Fishman is a very focused and very gifted guy sonically.
I think we did four trips up to Fishman HQ to voice this guitar. They were two day trips, and when you’re spending most of each day in the studio listening very intently, it’s really hard work. Then we’d go away and play with some stuff and then we’d go back. It was very intense and in its own way harder than the Telecaster.”
It’s like you’ve had a hit first album and now you’ve got to follow it up, we offer.
“Yes, that’s a perfect analogy, because a lot of times you’ve had all your life to experience and write that first album… and now to only have a year of experience to follow that up. Oh, and you’ve been on tour the whole time…!
“One thing we learned on this journey, just in general terms, now that I’ve had nearly three years experimenting with the platform and we as a group have had about two years experimenting with the ‘engine’, so to speak, it’s a far subtler thing that you’d think just looking at it. There are a lot of little subtleties, and because you don’t have a lot to work with, everything really matters. So it’s really sharpened our focus as designers, as sound engineers, in terms of saying, ‘Okay, this really does matter.’”
“It’s a smaller chamber [than the Tele], so we had to tune the ‘doughnut’ differently” Tim Shaw