Monday, January 9, 2012

Review: Fender Jag-Stang

Here is a another cool guitar. Kurt Cobain's brainchild: the Fender Jag-StangYeap, designed by the man himself, this guitar is somewhat a combination of the Fender Jaguar and the Fender Mustang (as the name clearly shows..)



Features: It's a 2004 Japanese reissue, in sonic blue. It has 22 frets, a rosewood fretboard and a maple neck. It has a solid basswood body, with a body type. The basswood makes it a lot lighter than other guitars, and the pickup controls (two on-off-phase switches, one for each pickup) are easy to use. It also has master volume and tone controls, for the single coil and humbucker pickups. The Stratocaster style headstock is laminated, and has the "designed by Kurt Cobain" mark on the back. The only bad feature is the floating tremolo, which makes the whole thing go out of tune if it is so much as breathed on. Also, the body has no contours, which is annoying, but scarcely a serious problem. // 7

Sound: Don't let most of the other people fool you, the play of this guitar is great. The neck pickup is pretty good, giving a nice full sound (kind of surprised me coming from a single), but the humbucker is merely pleh. The single actually generates more sound than the humbucker. As you might expect, it's good for distortion, however the stock pickups are not particularly high quality, and so hamper its sound. The single coil does give a fairly good low-level distortion, but I would still recommend changing the pickups. It is primarily a guitar for rhythm playing, as it is very difficult to bend the strings a lot, has a shorter scale neck and the basswood body gives it very little sustain. But chords played on it sound wonderful, and you can Switch from powerful and meaty, to gentle and resounding with relative ease. // 7

Action, Fit & Finish: The guitar, is almost perfectly set up; the only problem I encountered was that the action was too low, causing a sizable amount of string buzz. Other than that it was completely fine, though as mentioned earlier the floating tremolo bridge winds me up endlessly. // 8

Reliability & Durability: This guitar will definitely withstand live playing. Don't let anybody tell you differently. Over a long period of time you may have to replace the selector switches, but that's just because plastic will eventually wear down. Same thing happens with a car's standard gearbox. Wears down over time. The strap buttons are nice and solid, though I know that a lot of people will never trust buttons. It does have an annoying tendency to suddenly drop out of tune, but as long as the bridge is left alone, I have found it not to be a problem. // 8

Impression: I think this is a good all round guitar, though as I said, not for lead playing. The wonderful tone you can get from it quickly cancels out any of the flaws. The only thing I wish was different, is a Tune-O-Matic bridge instead of the God awful floating trem. // 8

17 comments:

  1. Looks mint might have to pick up the guitar and start learning again! + following

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  2. Designed by Cobain? Is it for leftys?

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  3. Can you set the action on the neck lower? It should help with getting those strings down to the frets so you can bend the notes. It is pretty. And if you can afford it, who wouldn't want to have a guitar just for rhythm and a tech to hand it to you in the middle of a set? I'm adding your blog to my blogroll. You'll see it on the right in Blogs Around the Globe.

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  4. I really like this one. Nice and red...

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  5. Looks great, can't argue with Nirvana.

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  6. Nothing involving Kurt Cobain can be good. >.<

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  7. Kurt Cobain designed guitars while the Japanese make them?

    Learned something new today.

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  8. If was designed by Cobain, then it must be a good guitar.

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  9. That is one beast looking guitar love the ones like that

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  10. cool guitar! it must make nice tune :) you got your self a new follower +1 :D

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  11. Cool guitar man! I bet that would sound awesome with my Yamaha Stage Custom drumset.

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  12. love the guitar! great blog, following!

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