Fender Custom shop Vintage Custom series
from £3,359
While its ‘Vintage Custom’ title accurately sums up the concept of this Custom Shop series, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Despite the Custom Shop’s reputation for aged and relic’d guitars, these guitars (in their base specifications) centre on a NOS time-warp vibe. ‘Timeless’ might be a better word: each model gets a gasp as you pull it from its tweed or brown case. The Custom Shop knows how to make a guitar – the whole package, really – feel very special.
The series initially launched last year with a 1950 Double Esquire, 1955 and 1959 Stratocasters, and a 1959 Telecaster Custom. The four models we have here – a ’57 Strat, ’58 Top-Load Tele, ’58 Jazzmaster and ’62 Strat – were added at the start of this year. Despite spanning three Fender classics, our quartet on review show off quite a unity: they share numerous features and feel very much like a series.
Obviously, each has its own ‘custom’ credentials. The ’57 Strat in its White Blonde finish with gold hardware has been referred to by Fender as “the first custom Fender Stratocaster ever produced”. It’s become quite a cult classic, the so-called ‘Mary Kaye’ Strat, even though the actual artist never owned the guitar.
The ’58 Tele celebrates the historically odd switch by Fender to a top-loading bridge, but, like the Jimmy Page Mirror Telecaster we looked at earlier this year, it rather unusually still has the through-thebody holes and ferrules. True to its vintage, it also uses the post-’53/pre-’67 control circuit, although a standard ‘modern’ circuit is included all mounted on its control plate.
The ’58 Jazzmaster “represents one of the earliest known prototypes and offers some unique, rare features”, says Fender, most obviously its maple Strat neck, periodspecific Custom Color Desert Sand finish and a black anodised scratchplate.
The fourth example we have here is a 1962 Strat but with the ‘wrong’ fingerboard. The historians will tell us that Fender had switched to a slab (aka flat-lam) rosewood fingerboard, without the all-maple neck’s rear skunk stripe or truss-rod plug, by the middle of 1959. It changed to a thinner ‘round lam’ style after July 1962 and maple was only listed as an option post-CBS from May of 1967. As historian Andre Duchossoir notes, “Earlier pre-CBS maple-’board Strats are known to exist, but they are exceedingly rare!”
As we discuss with the Custom Shop’s Mike Lewis in the feature that follows this review, all four models use a nitro ‘Flash Coat’ finish, which will probably polarise opinion. In places it not only looks a little, er, hastily done, it feels slightly textured, especially on the ash-bodied models. If you expect dipped-in-glass mirror-like finishes, they simply won’t be for you. Unlike many of the Custom Shop’s output with their bashed-up, relic’d dress, this quartet appears virtually brand-new, the exception being the hardware, which is classed as Closet Classic with its light ageing.
these models show how a player might have felt picking up a Fender for the first time back in the day
Our four examples also feature the same compound fingerboard radius (184 to 241mm /7.25 to 9.5 inches) “based on ultrarare examples we found from that era”, says Fender’s PR. Let’s investigate…
feel & sounds
If you own or have been lucky enough to play a Custom Shop guitar, you’ll understand the magic. Despite it being the most known, most copied and almost a generic cliché, it’s impossible not to enjoy the ’57 Strat. The ’57-style Soft ‘V’ neck profile is the biggest of the foursome here (see the Dimensions chart on p97), although not by very much.
All four have a remarkably similar feel: the new gloss finish of the maple necks, the same bigger-than-vintage frets (Jescar 50085), and that subtle compound radius, which many might find the ultimate compromise between true vintage and modern. This parity is enhanced by virtually identical setups, nut widths, string gauge (0.010 to 0.046) and string height, measured between 1.5mm and 1.6mm on both treble and bass sides.
So although the ’62 Strat’s ’63 ‘C’ profile is slightly thinner in depth in the lower positions, the ’58 Tele’s 10/56 ‘V’ feels only slightly more V’d, and the ’58 Jazzmaster shoots for a virtually identical feel to the ’57 Strat. The quartet not only feel sibling-similar, they feel very grown up – considerably bigger and tougher than the quartet of Mexican-made Vinteras we looked at in our previous issue, for example. Weight wise, they all sit in a tight range, even the usually heavier Jazzmaster – neither ultra-light and certainly not Les Paul heavy. Perfect? For many, yes.
Yet despite the similarities, even the two Strats have distinctly different characters. The ’62’s neck feels a little more rounded in lower positions but very similar as you get to the body. Both have vintage hook-up on the tone controls, so there’s no tone for the bridge, and the ’57 sounds very slightly hotter and fuller; the ’62 is marginally thinner with a little more bite. As ever, pull back the volume a little and you’ll soften and round the highs a bit, which can help to tame that classic response with a crunchier amp voice. These characters continue through the sounds, and just when you think you’ve found the one, swap over and there’s a subtly different shade. The more we play, the more the differences
the quartet feel sibling-similar and very grown up – bigger and tougher than the Vinteras
are enhanced. The ’57’s neck seems to get bigger and both become a little stickier than perhaps we’d like.
Character is what this ’58 Tele is all about. Aside from it being quite the looker, and with a simply superb weight, you might be forgiven if you didn’t realise it’s supplied top-loaded. You certainly don’t feel that it sounds un-Tele-like, far from it. Is there less sustain or an easier bending feel? Probably a yes to both, but here it’s more subtle than we’ve experienced before. Maybe that’s down to the fact that both bridge and neck pickups here are stellar-sounding. There’s that pushy honk to the bridge that sounds noticeably pokier than either Strat, while the neck is a lot less soft than you might expect – think slightly smoothed Strat.
The supplied circuit, as we explain in Under The Hood on p98, doesn’t give us both pickups on together unless you jam the switch between position 1 and 2
(which really isn’t easy). And while the rolled off preset bass of the neck pickup is nice to remind us how things would have been back in the day, it has little use – unless you like your guitars with no treble. It’s all a fun experiment, but with a choice to through-string the guitar and a post-’67 control plate in the case, that’s more than likely the route we’d take.
If all Jazzmasters sounded as good as this one then the model’s history might well have been different. There’s a resonance and depth here that supports the significantly different hardware and electronics – the former typically creating a shorter, plunkier response, while the latter seems to enhance the Fender sound with added bass and highs. The volume here really is your friend and it instantly pulls down the ice-pick edge; the actual tone seems slow to have any really noticeable effect. Swapping back to the ’62 Strat it almost sounds demure in comparison with this Jazzmaster.
In stark contrast with the ‘gigged around the planet for years’ feel of a relic, the overriding time-warp feel reminds us that these are very new guitars. Obvious, of course, but there are no improvements (aside from that fingerboard radius and slightly larger frets), nor the mods we see on other Fender models, not to mention the competition. If perfect intonation is your bag then you might want to change the Tele’s saddles for compensated types. The vibratos need some settling in after the strings have stretched and many of us would perform our usual tweaks and lubrications. In short, like an engine, they need running in.