4.52am Issue: 042 13th July 2017 - The Best Ex Edition

LEE RANALDO JAZZMASTER
Fender Signature Jazzmaster
Well, we couldn’t talk about Lee Ranaldo
and miss out on his quite wonderfully
tailored Jazzmaster, or rather his Fender
Signature version (he wouldn’t lend me
the original.)
In many ways, this is the anti-Jazzmaster
– if Elvis Costello was strictly vanilla,
Ranaldo and bandmate Thurston Moore
created what amounted to a new guitar
design; Ranaldo simplifying the controls
and replacing the pickups with a pair of
Wide Range Humbuckers, with the
eventual guitar being christened a
‘Jazzblaster’ and again, not a lot of
arguments on that either.
Saying all of that, Ranaldo’s Jazzmaster
removed a lot of the ‘quirks’ that often
put guitarists off Fender’s offsets, which
when you consider how much of an
experimenter the chap is, seems perverse
in itself. So we say goodbye to the rhythm
circuit, the three-way switch goes sideto-side,
not up-and-down, and the
scratchplate is anodised aluminium –
all of which are practical given the grief
Lee’s guitars get on stage – and the
controls we are left with are simplicity
itself.
As for the neck, this again is pretty
vintage – Moore went for Jumbo frets
on a 7.5” radius, but Ranaldo stayed
with the thin vintage frets, which
perhaps says something about their
respective playing styles.
As for the finish – I love it, but it does
have that garden centre fence stain
look to it, despite Fender applying a
thin coat of nitro with their usual
perfectionist zeal.
All in all this is a special guitar,
something completely different, which
is often the case with a signature
model, but for once the changes will
make sense to any guitarist. Beautiful.