Many 'upgrades' dictate gold-plated hardware, fancy inlays and colours.
The guitar features a modern 'C'-shape to its neck, although its fingerboard widens more expansively out towards the body, and those 22 jumbo frets - and they are big - have always been a more comfortable option to those spindly vintage wires.Īside from purely aesthetic changes like the logo font, most of these Highway One upgrades are all about sound and performance. A Tele of a standard configuration will never be perfectly at home with extreme rock and metal styles but, for blues, country, pop and the rest it's ideally suited. If the classic tone is just too bright for you, the tone pot is subsequently a far more capable tool to wield. It still amazes us just how versatile a Tele can be, and the Greasebucket simply adds more and more sounds to your fingertips. The Tele is, as you'd expect, a 'zingy' proposition and with a similar gain setting it cuts like a knife… wholly musically, of course. SoundsĪ conundrum with reviewing such iconic guitars is exactly what to plug into, let alone what to play, so we ultimately plumped for a Rivera Clubster 45 and set to work. When we removed the Tele's control plate during our investigation into the Greasebucket circuit we found that one of the screw holes securing the chrome had been drilled into the body twice.
Niggles? Well, we did discover a shoddy point. The guitar features a single-piece neck of a lightly flecked maple. The Tele's bridge plate bears a trio of chromed saddles and traditional thru-body stringing. Any electricians among you will appreciate the information that each Greasebucket tone control wiring includes two ceramic disk capacitors alongside a 4.7k ohm metal film resistor: for the rest of us, just knowing it's there is enough… On the Tele the Greasebucket affects all three pickup selections. I actually named it myself after the can of used bacon grease that used to sit on our stove at home when I was a kid." So now you know! Replacing the vintage-style single-coils are what Fender describes as Hot Strat and Tele single-coils that are all based around an Alnico III magnet foundation, a mid-strength magnet that should provide a slightly enhanced, hotter performance when compared to an Alnico II.Īdditionally, the guitar offers Fender's increasingly popular Greasebucket tone circuit that was developed in the Custom Shop as a way of rolling off the high-end without the usual low-end woomph of a standard passive tone control circuit.ĭidn't this have something to do with a certain Billy Gibbons? "We designed with him in mind," states Fender's Mike Eldred, "and he was the testing guy. Electronically Fender has gone back to the drawing board too with the power of the guitar's pickups being increased.
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