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Hi, folks. How are you doing today?
My name is Allen Abbassi, I'm the Senior Product Development Manager for
Fender Electric Guitars and Basses.
I want to talk to you today a little bit about our parallel universe guitars.
What I'm holding here is an American and the lead telecaster.
The parallel universe concept is kind of mixing and matching different fender
elements or modifying traditional platforms to give the player something
exciting, and new and some modifications that will enhance their playing.
What we've done is we've taken the elite telecaster as a platform and
done some serious modifications to it.
Being an elite telecaster, that means there are some special features already
about this guitar that are really cool.
Number one would be the neck.
It's a very interesting compound C to D neck shape.
So it starts as a C and gets a little flatter as you go to the top.
It's a compound radius fret board.
So again, it gets a little flatter as you move towards the higher register
frets here.
It's 9.5-inch to 14-inch radius.
Medium jumbo frets and then this unique wheel truss rod adjustment.
It's a little easier to do a truss rod adjustment with this wheel that we put in
the elite telecasters.
So now I'm going to play a little
bit of distorted tone for
you through our level set buffer,
our pugilist distortion and
then the mirror image delay.
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We used lacquer paint.
Lacquer is a little bit of an upgrade.
It's considered a premium finish and it just allows the guitar to breathe a little
bit better the actual wood of the guitar.
So you've got a lacquer neck with a satin back and
a lacquer finish body with this beautiful ash, age cherry.
Another thing about the elite telecaster is it has these nice contours like
a strat, so it's comfortable against your body.
On this particular parallel universe model, we have a very unique bevel here
that we carved into the top that's for comfort under your forearm here.
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One of the main features is that we add a middle pickup to the guitar.
A lot of professional players over the years have added a pickup to their
telecasters.
So they can get more tonal range, variety of options, etc.
So we've done that here, but we did it in a very interesting way.
Instead of using a traditional strat metal pickup, which is what a lot of people do
we actually took the bridge tele pickup and moved it to the middle.
So you'll note that we actually mounted it the same way the bridge pickup on
a telecaster would be mounted and we've done that inside the pick guard.
So we have two pure vintage 64 telecaster pickups with a Shawbucker.
So that gives you a really nice tonal range.
You can get heavy sounds, clean sounds, nice soaring leads.
So I'll give you an example of the Shawbucker.
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So that is a very fixed
sound, you can also get
telecaster style sounds.
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Another cool feature of this model is that we have a five-way strat switch, so
you can get all the different pickup configurations of a strat and
the S-1 switch throws in another little feature that allows you to add the neck
pickup in positions where it normally is not on.
So that means in the middle position when these two pickups are on, if you press
the S-1 switch and it activates the neck and you get all three pickups.
And you can also get your standard tele bridge and neck at the same time, as well.
So here's an example of using the S-1 to add the neck pickup in with bridge,
humbucking pickup.
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Just kind of brings in some of that fatness and warmth from the neck pickup.
Couple other you need features here, you'll notice that it's a hardtail bridge,
so we have polish black subtles.
One for each string and also the Shawbucker pickup,
it's actually mount to directly to the body which is unique.
You can see the route there around the pickup.
That's a unique way to mount the pickup.
So thanks for
checking out the Parallel Universe American Elite Teller Caster with me.
Stay tuned for more video.
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