*Artist500series
pictured
Tommy“O”
staffguitaristfor
GeorgeLopez-
LopezTonight
knowshisfrequencies
I can honestly say Zaolla Silverline cables are the best I’ve used thus far
I’m sold!
za olla.co m /to m m y_o for full intervie w
Make-up courtesy MAC Cosmetics
132 PREMIER GUITAR MAY 2011
REVIEWS > FENDER
cool pickup blender knob. As on the ’ 51, it
won’t do much for you if you’re looking for
mellow jazz tones or burly saxophone honk
of the sort you’d normally summon with a
Tone-knob tweak, but it does offer a lot of
hip tone-shaping possibilities.
The ’ 72 is a cooker, especially through
a potently projecting 4x10 Super Reverb.
It kicks hard from the bridge pickup and
slings Zep and Paul Kossoff tones whether
you’re jamming a big or small amp. The
neck-position humbucker—a visual and
sonic nod to the ’ 72 Thinline Telecaster—is
predictably darker, but it can be blended
with the more slicing bridge humbucker
to create a harmonically rich blend that
sounds fat, zingy, and jangly under the
guitar’s 25 1/2" scale. A little pedal overdrive turned the ’ 72 into a perfect vehicle
for grinding open-tuned Black Crowes- or
Faces-style jams—ringing with a whole
spectrum of overtones and a string-to-string
definition that highlighted funky pull-offs
and snap bends. And moving between the
two pickups in the middle of a lead created
some very cool, almost modulating textures.
Unfortunately, the blend knob stopped
Rating:
Buy If...
Southern rock and high-octane
blues with a Stratocaster feel
just sound and feel right.
Skip If...
you can’t live without that
Tone knob or single-coils.
Fender
Street $799
fender.com
or use a mobile device to watch
video reviews of the guitars at
CLICKHere…
premierguitar.com/may2011
[The ’ 72] kicks hard from
the bridge pickup and slings
Zep and Paul Kossoff tones
whether you’re jamming a
big or small amp.
working (possibly due to a loose solder con-
nection) after a few hours of playing—and
before we’d shot the video review. Fender’s
Justin Norvell explains, “The model we sent
was from a first-production run and had
been deconstructed and rebuilt a few times
in the inspection and evaluation process. So
consider this a mea culpa for possibly rush-
ing the rebuild to get them out fast for this
first and exclusive review!”
The ’ 72 feels super slick under the fin-
gers. While the medium-jumbo frets and
C-shaped neck—one of the nicer necks I’ve
gripped in a while—enable fast fretwork,
they also make slow, lazy bends a joy. Because
it was set up with very low action, it took a
tweak on the truss rod and a few adjustments
to the saddles to get the action where I really
felt open notes were ringing in a way that
suits this cool, high-output pickup array.
The ’ 72 may not be everyone’s idea of a
looker, but if you dig the guitar equivalent
of a mag-wheeled custom van hanging cool
and low around your shoulders—and, more
importantly, if you crave the tones of that
time—the ’ 72 is great way to break away
from the pack.
Pawn Shop Mustang Special
Billed for much of its life as a student
model, the 24"-scale Mustang—which
debuted in 1964 as an evolution of the
Musicmaster and Duo Sonic—never got a
whole lot of respect from Strat and Tele devotees. But, over the years, it’s found its own
league of admirers: Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain
and Mudhoney’s Steve Turner used ’Stangs
to thrash out the garagier side of the Seattle
sound, Adrian Belew probed the outer limits
with a radically modified version, and Sonic
Youth’s Lee Ranaldo used a Mustang stuffed
with a humbucker to generate some of the
howling sounds and classic cuts from the
band’s late-’80s and early-’90s catalog.
Of those legendary ’Stangs, the Pawn Shop
Series Mustang Special is probably most akin
to Ranaldo’s modded ’ 69 model. Perhaps not
coincidentally, it’s packed with two Thinline
premierguitar.com
