There are vintage guitar fans, and then there are vintage Telecaster fanatics. True Telecaster purists turn up their noses at “improvements” like individual string saddles. They snort derisively at contoured bodies and low-noise pickups. The Telecaster design was perfect in the 1950s, damn it, and it’s perfect today.
Does that sound like you? Then move along—there’s nothing to see here.
But if you like the idea of a Telecaster packed to bursting with savvy modern updates, man, have I got an axe for you.
Reet Elite
The American Elite adheres to the classic Tele profile and traditional Telecaster design elements—at least when viewed from the front. Our review model’s body wears a lovely and flawless three-tone burst finish, framed by understated white binding. Its neck and fingerboard are maple, though the model is available with a rosewood fingerboard and in multiple finishes.
But the instant you strap on the Elite, you know you’re not in Vintageland anymore. There’s the comfy body bevel, and the modern neck-body joint with its asymmetric plate. The neck contours are a world apart from an old-school Tele. The neck employs a compound radius (9.5" at the nut, flattening out to 14" up high) and a grip that gradually transitions from C to D shape. The feel is light, slender, and wicked fast.
Well Heeled
Moving over the heel to and from the highest frets is about as effortless as it gets with a bolt-on neck. The medium jumbo frets are immaculately installed, with no rough edges whatsoever. The Elite is built for comfort and speed.
Our review model benefited from an expert setup. It played perfectly right out of the molded plastic case (included). Intonation is excellent, thanks in part to a modern bridge with six chromed-brass saddles. The tuning pegs are also modernized. They lock, and they employ short posts for a sharper string-break at the nut. (No buzzing here!) Another nice detail: the heel-mounted, wheel-style truss rod nut for fast neck-relief adjustments.
Ratings
Pros:
Excellent build. Fast, comfortable feel. Great tones. Noise-free pickups.
Cons:
Not for Telecaster purists.
Tones:
Playability:
Build/Design:
Value:
Street:
$1,799
Fender American Elite Telecaster
fender.com
Not Your Father’s Twang
The Elite sounds terrific, though not quite in an antique Tele way. The redesigned pickups are notably less noisy than traditional single-coils. The neck pickup delivers the jazz-ready warmth you expect from a fine Tele rhythm pickup. However, the bridge pickup’s tone is markedly modernized. It does excellent bright, clean tones, but without some of the characteristic “whine” of the traditional lead pickup. But what it lacks in clangy twang, it makes up for with greater beefiness. (You can definitely play country on the Elite, but the result will probably be more 21st-century Nashville than mid-century retro tones.) The combined pickups have a pretty, acoustic-like airiness.
There’s also a fourth option: A push-push S-1 switch in the volume knob changes the combined-pickup setting from traditional parallel wiring to series wiring. Variations on this scheme have long been popular Tele mods. As usual, this higher-output provides greater level, but darker tones. Some players like this mod because the extra output can drive an amp harder than the traditional configurations. Ironically, players who have come to rely on series mods may require it less here than on most Teles. Every pickup setting provides sufficient power and mass for thick lead tones. You can definitely play heavy riff rock with this guitar.
And don’t get me started on the Elite’s sustain. I expected rich resonance based on how the guitar rang when strummed acoustically. But plugged in, the sustain is nearly surreal. Clean notes last and last. For overdriven tones, tack on several more “lasts.” Check out the final crunchy chord in the demo clip that accompanies the online version of this review. It rings for approximately 47 days. (It felt like that, anyway.) The Elite just doesn’t want to shut up.
The Verdict
Fender’s American Elite Telecaster is a bold update from traditional Teles. It will appeal to guitarists in many styles, but it’s especially suitable for players reared on sleek, modern, hard-rock guitars, and the slim, shapely neck will delight speed demons. The Elite isn’t a tone clone of vintage models, but it compensates with extra output and mass. Considering the Elite’s quality materials, ingenious design details, excellent build quality, and U.S. manufacture, the $1,799 price is reasonable. Well played, Fender!
Watch the Review Demo:
The Rickenbacker 481’s body style was based on the 4001 bass, popularly played by Paul McCartney. Even with that, the guitar was too experimental to reach its full potential.
By the early 1970s, the great interest the lads had sparked in 6- and 12-string Ricks had waned. But thankfully for the company, there was still high demand for yet another Beatles-played instrument: the 4001 bass.
Paul McCartney was gifted a 4001 by Rickenbacker in 1965, which he then used prominently throughout the group’s late-’60s recordings and while leading Wings all through the ’70s. Other rising stars of rock also donned 4000 series models, like Yes’Chris Squire, Pink Floyd’sRoger Waters, the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and more.
And like that, a new star was born.
So, what’s a guitar company to do when its basses are selling better than its guitars? Voilà: The Rickenbacker 480. Introduced in 1972, it took the 4000-series body shape and created a standard 6-string out of it, using a bolt-on neck for the first time in the brand’s history.
The 481’s slanted frets predate the modern multi-scale phenomenon by decades. The eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
“It was like a yo-yo at Rickenbacker sometimes,” factory manager Dick Burke says in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo. “We got quiet in the late ’60s, but when the bass started taking off in the ’70s, we got real busy again, so making a 6-string version of that was logical, I guess.”
The gambit worked, for a time. Sales of the 480 were strong enough at first that, in 1973, a deluxe model was introduced—the 481—and it’s one of these deluxe versions that we’re showcasing here.
“The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.”
Take a close look and you’ll notice that the body shape isn’t the only remarkable feature. The 481 was Rickenbacker’s first production run to feature humbucker pickups. Here, you can see each humbucker’s 12 pole pieces dotting through the chrome cover, a variant casing only available from 1975 to 1976. (Interestingly enough, the pickups had first been developed for the 490, a prototype that never made it to public release, which would’ve allowed players to substitute different pickups by swapping loaded pickguards in and out of the body.)
The new pickups were also treated with novel electronics. The standard 3-way pickup-selector switch is here, but so is a second small switch that reverses the pickups’ phase when engaged.
The inventive minds at Rickenbacker didn’t stop there: The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
Long before the fanned fret phenomenon caught on in the modern, progressive guitar landscape, Rickenbacker had been toying around with the slant-fret concept. Originally available from 1970 forward as a custom order on other models, slant frets were all but standard on the 481 (only a small minority of straight-fret 481s were built).
The 481 was the deluxe version of the 480, which preceded it and marked the first time the company used a bolt-on neck.
Dick Burke, speaking separately to writer Tony Bacon in an interview published on Reverb, only half-recalls the genesis and doesn’t remember them selling particularly well: “Some musicians said that’s the way when you hold the neck in your left hand—your hand is slanted. So, we put the slanted frets in a few guitars. I don’t know how many, maybe a hundred or two—I don’t recall.”
Even proponents of the 481 do not necessarily sing the praises of the slanted fretboard. Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, a 481 superfan, told Rickenbacker Guitars author Martin Kelly, “I don’t just love the 481, it’s part of me.... The 481’s slanted frets have made my fingers crooked for life, but I don’t care, I’ll take that for it’s given me riff after riff after riff."
Initial 480-series sales were promising, but the models never really took off. Though they were built as late as 1984, the slant-fret experiment of the 481 was called off by 1979. And these slanted models have not, in the minds of most players or collectors, become anywhere near as sought-after as the classic 330s and 360s, or, for that matter, the 4001s.
For that reason, 481s—despite their novelty and their lists of firsts for Rickenbacker—can still be found for relatively cheap. Our Vintage Vault pick, which is being sold by the Leicester, England-based Jordan Guitars Ltd, has an asking price of 3,350 British pounds (or about 4,300 U.S. dollars), which is still well under half the going-rate of early 360s, 660s, and other more famous Ricks. Some lucky buyers have even found 481s on Reverb for less than $2,000, which is unheard of for other vintage models.
With its idiosyncratic charms, the 481 remains more within reach than many other guitars of a similar vintage.
Sources: Martin Kelly’s Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, Tony Bacon’s"Interview: Dick Burke on the Creation of the Rickenbacker 12-String | Bacon’s Archive" on Reverb, Reverb Price Guide sales data.
