The Internet Has Thoughts About MusicRadar's Fender 75th Anniversary Telecaster Review.

The Suede Read

MusicRadar reviewed the Fender 75th Anniversary Vintera Road Worn 1951 Telecaster at $1,899, or £1,599, or €1,795, and gave it four and a half stars out of five. It gave the same four and a half stars to a second guitar in the same piece, the American Professional Classic Cabronita Telecaster, which costs $1,999, is built in the USA rather than Mexico, carries TV Jones humbuckers instead of single coils, and has no tone control at all. One rating, two instruments, two factories, two price tags. Before anybody tests a single claim, that is a score a shopper cannot spend.

So take the '51 alone, which is what anyone reading about a butterscotch Blackguard came for. Ash body, one-piece tinted maple neck in a 1951 'U' shape with a walnut skunk stripe, 21 tall narrow frets, bone nut, brass barrel saddles in an ashtray bridge with the cover packed in the case, Pure Vintage '51 pickups, a 75th Anniversary neckplate, 7.39lb on the scales, tweed hard case, made in Mexico.

Neville Marten likes it, and in places the writing earns the enthusiasm. He cannot tell whether the ash body is two pieces or three beneath the butterscotch tinted and checked nitrocellulose, which is a real compliment about a real thing. The neck gets the best line in the piece: a chunky old baseball bat, scary when you first gaze down at it on your lap, and then surprisingly comfy and not at all tiring to play. On sound, he runs the Blackguard through twang, jazz, funk rhythm and dark blues-rock leads and finds all of them there.

Notice the verb the review reaches for when it describes the finish. The ultra-thin, satin-feel lacquer, it says, apes the worn away look and feel of actual vintage guitars. Apes. That is the magazine's own word, and it is a more honest account of what factory aging is than anything in the summary boxes.

Because the summary boxes say something else. Three pros: the '51 is a reasonably priced and good take on Fender's original, it is nicely aged, and it has fabulous classic Tele tones. The cons box holds three lines, and exactly one of them concerns the '51: some might find its neck a handful. The other two belong to the Cabronita, the second guitar in the review.

That is the '51's entire recorded downside. An $1,899 guitar, and the one thing a buyer is warned about is a neck profile some might not prefer.

Now hold reasonably priced against a number the same review prints two panels further down. Under range options it lists the standard Vintera II '50s Nocaster and '60s Telecaster at £979 each, and the Limited Edition Road Worn '60s Telecaster at £1,189. This one is £1,599. The two nearest comparisons in Fender's own catalogue are on the same page as the verdict, and the anniversary model carries more than £400 over the closer of them and more than £600 over the standard build. Reasonably priced is doing a great deal of unexamined work.

The review does harbour one instinct in that direction, and then walks it back. Marten writes that were these indeed production models, he would suggest Fender met the skinny neck of the Cabronita and the chunky bat of the Road Worn somewhere in the middle. A limited anniversary run gets to keep the extremes and gets graded as though the extremes were choices.

There is also a framing choice worth naming. The review sets the two guitars against each other as archetypes, the Cabronita as the hot-rodded showstopper any custom builder might devise, the Road Worn as the traditional, plain Jane journeyman instrument adored by legends. Plain Jane is a lovely phrase and it does a specific job here: it makes a $1,899 anniversary edition sound like a working tool rather than a commemorative product with a dated neckplate on it.

What the premium buys is the neckplate, the '51 profile, and the aging. The aging is where the forums have been for a very long time.

The Seymour Duncan Forum has been arguing about relicing since 2009. Call me old-fashioned, wrote one member in a thread asking why anyone still buys new, but I won't own a relicized guitar. It's like buying new jeans with holes in them. That is a taste position and it is entitled to be one. It is also a slice of the market this review never acknowledges exists.

The more useful thread is about playing them. The necks feel good, wrote one member, but the consistency from guitar to guitar is spotty. Another was blunter: yes they do vary so much. mostly in the favor of them being crap. but every once in a while i pick up a nice one as well.

Which is the trouble with a single-sample review of a program built on variance. MusicRadar received one guitar and, on the evidence of the piece, it was a good one. Nothing in the review tells a reader that quality is distributed unevenly across the Road Worn line, or offers any way to judge the one hanging on the wall in front of them. An instrument sold on the promise of individual character is reviewed as though character came off the jig identically every time.

Fluffed. One rating stretched across two guitars. One con against a $1,899 Telecaster. And a reasonably priced verdict printed on the same page as the £979.