
Small refinements make this Kurt Cobain-designed fusion of Fender short scales a sweet-playing serving of surprises.
Improved, more versatile pickups. Fast and narrow neck. Excellent quality. Unique styling by Kurt Cobain himself.
Humbucker can still feel a touch antiseptic and flat. Narrow neck will be too narrow for some. Mustang-style switching can be cumbersome.
$1,249
Fender Jag-Stang
fender.com
It doesn’t take deep analysis of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics, journals, and visual art to glean that he was, in many ways, a fluid and impulsive artist—one that reveled in riding waves of free-association and stoking musical and poetic conflagrations from sparks of incidental information and observation. Cobain also admired (and collaborated with) author, poet, and visual artist William S. Burroughs, whose embrace of cut-up technique, a collagist approach to writing and language, informed his most famous work, the novel Naked Lunch.
The possibilities of cut-up and collage technique were not lost on Cobain. In fact, they are plain to see in the Fender he helped design, the Jag-Stang. The Jag-Stang was born from Cobain sketching mutant mashups of the two models, re-assembling scissored photographs of both, then pulling together components that could cover the breadth of his aggressive but melodically articulate sounds. The end product was a quirky instrument. I have an original that I treasure for punky, thrashy chording, open tunings, and unhinged soloing—practices Cobain would have no doubt approved of. But in more straight-ahead applications, the Jag-Stang always left me contemplating a laundry list of modifications I would enjoy to make it warmer and more stable.
Fender Jag-Stang played through black-panel Fender Tremolux and Universal Audio OX using tweed Deluxe-style cabinet emulation.
- Bridge humbucker alone
- Neck single coil alone
- Bridge and neck single coil together in phase
- Bridge and neck single coil together out of phase
- Pickups played in same order as above with Boss SD-1 Super OverDrive with level, tone, and drive at noon.
The most recent Mexico-made iteration of the Jag-Stang, while identical to original specification in nearly every respect, irons out a few rough edges that made the model less appealing to traditionally aligned players. It feels both more refined and more inviting.
More Horse Than Cat
The Jag-Stang favors the equine side of that relationship. The bridge, vibrato, pickup switching, control layout, and even the body dimensions owe much more to the Mustang than the Jaguar. In fact, the most overt nods to Jaguar lineage are in the shape of the upper horn and the lower hip, both of which accentuate the offset, flying-while-sitting-still Jaguar-ness in the body profile.
As with the original Jag-Stang, the neck (which was shaped to match one of Cobain’s favorite Mustang necks) is a slinky, narrow, and relatively slim length of maple that evokes many slender necks I’ve encountered on mid-to-late-’60s Mustangs. By my ruler—and Fender’s spec sheet—the nut measures around 1.575", which is narrower than the 1.650" nut width featured on the current Vintera ’60s Mustang, American Original ’60s Jaguar, and many other instruments.
It’s perceptibly slimmer than your average Fender, and for players of smaller stature or that just like the sensation of navigating a neck this compact, it’s a blast. In spite of the compact feel, the neck still has 22 frets. And while the fret spacing might frustrate players used to performing lead acrobatics in more spacious expanses, adaptive, creative, and open-minded players will dig how it facilitates navigation of odd intervals and chord shapes as well as fleet-fingered leads. My original’s made-in-Japan neck has a little more roll at the edge of the vintage-correct 7.25" fretboard. For most players that already dig the comfortable, compact proportions, the ever-so-slightly sharper edge won’t make much difference. Curiously, the guitar also features a slab fretboard—an unusual touch for a neck built to late-’60s specifications.
Through an overdrive, the bridge humbucker sounds awesome, and you don’t need much pedal gain to make it mean and massive.
Mighty Mite
I bought my second hand Jag-Stang because I play Jaguars and liked the idea of a humbucker in a 24"-scale guitar. My dreams of a short-scale that could dish Peter Green tones were dashed pretty quickly. The original Jag-Stang humbucker was just too hot and comparatively flat in terms of color and character. The new Jag-Stang’s bridge pickup, however, sounds and feels slightly but significantly improved. It’s still explosive with a juiced amp or distortion in the mix. But it also sounds a lot less cramped and abrasive in the midrange than its predecessor. It’s also more responsive to guitar volume and tone attenuation, which means you can add a touch of PAF-like wooliness and explore more nooks and crannies in the EQ curve. Through an overdrive, the bridge humbucker sounds awesome, and you don’t need much pedal gain to make it sound mean and massive. It also retains great capacity for note detail in these supercharged modes.
The neck position single-coil has many characteristics of a hot Stratocaster unit. It’s a bit more inclined toward overdrive than a vintage-voiced Fender single-coil, and at times feels less dynamically responsive and nuanced. But like the bridge pickup, it also feels responsive to guitar volume and tone adjustments. The two pickups work well in tandem, too. The in-phase combination (enabled by moving both pickup’s slider switches to the aft position) sounds great straight into an amp, though it can sound a bit compressed and jumbled with added pedal distortion. The out-of-phase setup is fun, too, yielding scads of scrappy, toppy garage tones when you send the signal direct to a loud amp and super-focused pedal-distortion tones that sound deliciously nasty against prominent bass accompaniment.
The Verdict
The Jag-Stang is not the most fantastically versatile Fender ever, but it’s full of surprises. As you’d expect, it shines in garage-y and punky settings. Distorted tones emphasize a dryish sense of detail over sheer mass or a PAF’s soft contours. But there’s a lot of room for expression in that palette, and the new pickups’ improved response to volume and tone knob coloration expands the possibilities.
Like many Fenders from the company’s Ensenada, Mexico factory, the Jag-Stang is pretty close to flawless. It’s probably about 20 times as tuning stable as my MIJ original. The narrow neck and short scale won’t delight everyone. But if you approach different guitars without preconceptions, you’ll be thrilled and surprised at the fast maneuvers and phrasings the Jag-Stang makes possible. Needless to say, many fundamental sounds are geared for Cobain-style fire, but you do not have to be a Nirvana fan to extract unexpected tones and inspiration from this distinctive and unique Fender.
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The country virtuoso closes out this season of Wong Notes with a fascinating, career-spanning interview.
We’ve saved one of the best for last: Brad Paisley.The celebrated shredder and seasoned fisherman joins host Cory Wong for one of this season’s most interesting episodes. Paisley talks his earliest guitar-playing influences, which came from his grandfather’s love of country music, and his first days in Nashville—as a student at Belmont University, studying the music industry.
The behind-the-curtain knowledge he picked up at Belmont made him a good match for industry suits trying to force bad contracts on him.
Wong and Paisley swap notes on fishing and a mutual love of Phish—Paisley envies the jam-band scene, which he thinks has more leeway in live contexts than country. And with a new signature Fender Telecaster hitting the market in a rare blue paisley finish, Paisley discusses his iconic namesake pattern—which some might describe as “hippie puke”—and its surprising origin with Elvis’ guitarist James Burton.
Plus, hear how Paisley assembled his rig over the years, the state of shredding on mainstream radio, when it might be good to hallucinogenic drugs in a set, and the only negative thing about country-music audiences.
Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
As head of Breedlove and Bedell Guitars, he’s championed sustainability and environmental causes—and he wants to tell you about it.
As the owner of the Breedlove and Bedell guitar companies, Tom Bedell has been a passionate advocate for sustainable practices in acoustic guitar manufacturing. Listening to him talk, it’s clear that the preservation of the Earth’s forests are just as important to Bedell as the sound of his guitars. You’ll know just how big of a statement that is if you’ve ever had the opportunity to spend time with one of his excellently crafted high-end acoustics, which are among the finest you’ll find. Over the course of his career, Bedell has championed the use of alternative tonewoods and traveled the world to get a firsthand look at his wood sources and their harvesting practices. When you buy a Bedell, you can rest assured that no clear-cut woods were used.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A beautifully realized mashup of two iconic guitars.
Reader: Ward Powell
Hometown: Ontario, Canada
Guitar: ES-339 Junior
I’ve always liked unusual guitars. I think it started when I got my first guitar way back in 1976. I bought a '73 Telecaster Deluxe for $200 with money I saved from delivering newspapers.
I really got serious about playing in 1978, the same year the first Van Halen album was released. Eddie Van Halen was a huge influence on me, including how he built and modded guitars. Inspired by Eddie, I basically butchered that Tele. But keep in mind, there was once a time when every vintage guitar was just a used guitar—I still have that Tele, by the way.
I never lost that spirit of wanting guitars that were unique, and have built and modded a few dozen guitars since. When I started G.A.S.-ing simultaneously for a Les Paul Junior and a Casino, I came up with this concept. I found an Epiphone ES-339 locally at a great price. It already had upgraded CTS pots, Kluson tuners, and the frets had been PLEK’d. It even came with a hardshell case. It was cheap because it was a right-handed guitar that had been converted to left handed and all the controls had been moved to the opposite side, so it had five additional holes in the top.
Fortunately, I found a Duesenberg wraparound bridge that used the same post spacing as a Tune-o-matic. I used plug cutters to cut plugs out of baltic birch plywood to fill the 12 holes in the laminated top. I also reshaped the old-style Epiphone headstock. Then, I sanded off the original finish, taped the fretboard, and sprayed the finish using cans of nitro lacquer from Oxford Guitar Supply. Lots of wet sanding and buffing later, the finish was done.
I installed threaded insert bushings for the bridge, so it will never pull out. The pickup is a Mojotone Quiet Coil P-90 and I fabricated a shim from a DIY mold and tinted epoxy to raise the P-90 up closer to the strings. The shim also covers the original humbucker opening. I cut a pickguard out of a blank and heated it slightly to bend it to follow the curvature of the top.
All in all, I'm pretty happy how it turned out! It plays great and sounds even better. And I have something that is unique: an ES-339 Junior.
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SPECS:
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- Output 1/4” (6,35mm) Jack
- Headphone Output 1/8”(3,5mm) Jack
- 9V DC / 300mA (center negativ) / power supply, sold separately
- USB C