Fender American Ultra Telecaster

FENDER UPDATES THEIR TOP-OF-THE-RANGE TELECASTER DELUXE WITH A NEW SERIES NAME AND A COMPLETE REEVALUATION AND REDESIGN OF VIRTUALLY EVERY FEATURE.

You would think there would be no way to improve upon a Telecaster. Heck, you can still walk into a store today and buy a Tele with the same specs as one made in 1952. It’s a design that works, and that continues to work even as new genres spring up around it.

But Fender doesn’t rest on its laurels. The Fender of 2020 pays attention to what today’s players want to hang onto from the old days and what they want to have incorporated from more recent guitar development. Want a faithful ‘50s Tele replica? You can get that. Want a modern Tele that’s easier to play and more suited to the variety of tones a player in 2020 might require? That’s where the Fender American Ultra Telecaster comes in. It still feels like a Telecaster, but it’s not your grandad’s Tele.

The essential stuff is still present. The body is alder or ash depending on the finish you choose (alder is standard, but ash is spec’d for the Plasma Red Burst and Butterscotch Blonde). The alder-body finishes are Texas Tea, Ultraburst (the perfect three-colour sunburst), Mocha Burst (an almost browny-gold sunburst), Cobra Blue, Arctic Pearl, and one that has to be seen in person to be truly appreciated: Texas Tea, which looks black in low light conditions, but soon reveals itself to have subtle but effective colourshift elements that take on highlights of brown, gold and bottle-green depending on the lighting conditions. You can’t adequately photograph it, but your live audience is gonna love it.

Note that a few models have higher RRPs, including the Plasma Red Burst Telecaster reviewed here, and the Butterscotch Blonde. But Fender has actually kept the pricing the same as the American Deluxe range that preceded the American Ultra.

Different models also get different fretboard woods on their maple necks. Arctic Pearl, Ultraburst and Texas Tea get rosewood, while Butterscotch Blonde, Cobra Blue, Mocha Burst and Plasma Red Burst have maple. And those necks feature a new ‘Modern D’ profile with ultra rolled fretboard edges. The shoulders of the neck are a little higher than you might expect and yet they strangely make the neck feel thinner than it is, and extremely comfortable for long playing sessions or small hands.

The neck joins the body at a newly reshaped block joint which is more ergonomic than ever before. It’s not quite like an Ibanez All Access Neck Joint but as far as what players want and expect from a Strat, this is easily the most accessible neck joint ever. The rest of the bevels have been slightly redesigned for further comfort too. The fretboard has a compound radius starting at a roundish ten-inches at the nut end and flattening out to 14-inches at the widdly end of the neck. The 22 medium jumbo frets are finished perfectly on our review guitar; and while some players may bemoan the absence of so-hot-rightnow stainless steel frets, it’s important to remember that stainless steel does have its own impact on the tone – especially in terms of note attack, and in all likelihood Fender would have tried it during the R&D phase and found that it just took things a little too far from the brief.

The electronics are another big deal. Fender has gone all-out in designing the fifth generation of their Noiseless pickups, which are paired with a traditional three-way pickup selector blade switch and an S1 switch stealthed into the top of the volume pot. When the blade switch is in the middle position and the S1 is engaged, the two single coil pickups are connected in series, effectively turning into one giant humbucker.

I tested this guitar on a live covers gig with my trusty Marshall DSL50 on both its clean and dirty channels, and a bunch of effects including an Eventide H9 Max for delays, reverb and weird pitch shifting. The single coils are absolutely noise-free even under ridiculous amounts of gain, and the faux-humbucker setting is great for thickening the tone up even more. But my absolute favourite setting was the middle selector position with the S1 turned off, just running both single coils in parallel into my Marshall’s Crunch channel set for just enough dirt to go from a crisp clean jangle to a brash, chunky, Malcolm Young-esque snap depending on picking strength. This was absolutely one of the best live guitar sounds I’ve ever heard – something my co-guitarist also yelled out mid-song.

THE BOTTOM LINE

This guitar still very much sounds and plays like a Telecaster instead of just coming off like a Telecaster-shaped modern shred machine (although the HSS Strat from this series that we reviewed last issue definitely edges further towards that kind of designation), so it’s not a million miles removed from what we might expect of Fender, but it’s definitely seven decades removed from the first Fender Broadcasters that hit the market in 1950.