Getting Your Jazzer Going

A current Epiphone Joe Pass Emperor II

I am a big fan of large bodied jazz guitars. I am not an accomplished jazz player, at my best I am dabbling in it. That said, I still love jazz style guitars, What is a jazz style guitar you may ask?

Jazzer Basics

A jazzer is typically a hollow body guitar with a relatively slim neck. The scale length varies from maker to maker. Some jazzers are purely acoustic so you have to mike them up to play live or to record them, but the majority have some kind of pickup system.

Most commonly, we find a guitar with one or two humbuckers mounted to the top. The top on a jazz guitar should be solid wood, arched and likely made from spruce or a similar wood suitable for soundboards on acoustic guitars. Back and sides are sometimes solid wood, but much more commonly are laminates, with maple laminates being very common. The sides need to be rigid and so laminates work well here, and the back can be laminate because it gets deadened a bit by being against your body.

A jazz guitar can have a floating bridge, meaning care must be taken when removing strings if you want to keep the bridge in the same place. Other bridge systems that look like they float may actually be pinned so the bridge plate does not move around. Tailpieces are commonly attached to the body at the strap button or nearby and sit above the body of the guitar.

If the guitar has a pickguard, it is most often built to float above the top.

All my jazz guitars but two have humbuckers attached to the top. One exception is a Gibson L4-C where I installed a pickup that is attached to the fingerboard and floats above the top. This guitar has the jack, the volume and the tone all affixed under the pickguard so nothing other than the bridge plate is riding on the top. The L4-C was designed to be acoustic only, and I built it up for amplification such that I could revert it to fully acoustic when I choose to do so. The other is the D’Angelico Excel EXL-1

D’Angelico Excel EXL-1

When one talks about jazz guitars, depending on the vintage of the person you are speaking with, that person will envisage something different. When I was starting out, the most commonly known jazzer was the ES-175D from Gibson. Gibson doesn’t make these any longer but they are out there, albeit at pretty crazy prices. I have since added jazzers from Epiphone (an older Joe Pass model), D’Angelico (an Excel EXL-1) and a NAMM special PRS called the SC-J. That guitar is more a thin line hollowbody but with a jazzer’s body dimensions except for thickness.

Each sounds different and responds differently to the player. The ES-175D is a wonderful guitar, but it is work for me to get good tones from it. The PRS is easy. The L4-C is a very unique piece and is easy to play once I have reacclimatized to it. The D’Angelico is very playable but the fastest to decent tone for my hands and level of jazz incompetence is the Joe Pass. Epiphone was building serious jazzers long before Gibson although this fact gets buried in history. Gibson has done some really nice jazz boxes like the L-5CES, the Wes Montgomery and my personal favourite the Tal Farlow. I am a fan of Mr. Farlow as he was quite an innovative player. Not just really fast, like Joe Pass or Pat Martino, but outside the box. When you hear the word “tapping”, many players think of Edward Van Halen, but Mr. Farlow was tapping back in the Fifties. Not to take anything away from Eddie of course, but tapping comes from jazz.

Setup

When it comes to setup there are a lot of opinions. I like the action and setup as low as possible whilst ensuring that there is no fret buzz at all. The bodies all resonate and you can get a bit of hammer tone when hitting the strings to the fretboard if you need to press the strings down harder to get them to fret properly.

Strings

I also subscribe to the BB King school of why work so hard and prefer lighter strings. Rick Beato and Rhett Shull did a wonderful record and playback test which proved to my ears, which are still quite good, that I could not hear any difference between string gauges. It was common in the older times to string jazzers with 13s, but while bending strings is not a big part of jazz, and even vibrato can be frowned upon, I am very happy with 11s or even 10s.

D’Addario Chromes - easy to find and superb tone

As we know there are all kinds of strings out there. The L4-C came with acoustic strings. When I put the pickup on it, I switched to electric strings. I have tried nickel plated steel, Monel and stainless steel strings. I like the sound of Monel the most but they deaden quickest in my case. There are also different winds to consider. Most electric strings are round wounds. I have also used a D’Addario set called half-wounds which are like round wounds, but with the top of the outer winding flattened a bit. They are definitely warmer in tone than round wounds. For years I was using D’Addario Chromes which are nickel plated steel that are finished as flat wounds, which means that they feel completely smooth under your fingertips. Flatwounds are better known, I think, as bass strings, as the number of flat wound guitar strings generally available are a bit limited. I bought several sets of Curt Mangan Flatwounds in .10s but it looks like the company is not doing flat wounds any longer, so I will be going back to Chromes in the slightly heavier 0.11 gauge as bending is not a big part of jazz guitar. Another fine maker of flat wound strings but they are pricey here in Canada is Thomastik Infeld.

Amplifiers

‘65 Twin Reverb Reissue

From an amplifier perspective, I personally prefer a very clean amp that does not push into overdrive no matter how loud it is. My preference for jazz work is the Fender blackface Twin Reverb. Mine is a reissue and sounds great. I did try one of the Fender Tonemaster versions but something was missing. My rig is a dry - wet configuration with a small Blues Deluxe for the wet signal which in this case is mostly reverb and delay, although I do like to add some gentle rotary (Leslie) feel when playing chord sets. It’s been years since I played through one, but I also really liked the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus. I think it is a wonderful amplifier.

I will be candid that I am less fond of my jazzers through my other Fenders, Blackstar, Victory, Boogie and Marshall amps. The Koch Multitone has tons of headroom on the clean channel and is quite nice as is my older PRS Dallas although I have to watch it’s volume as it can tend to start pushing into overdrive.

I understand that serious jazz players would be less inclined to use pedals, and that’s fair. If I am recording, which is done sparely because I am not very good when it comes to jazz, I will mike the Twin Reverb, and then double the track in post, putting clean on the right, and the double on the left and only apply plugin effects to the left side. My preference in this case is one of the UA studio reverb options, like Ocean Way Studios or Capitol Chambers. I will also sometimes use a very gentle compressor plugin with a tube oriented Teletronix LA-2A silver. I don’t see this as cheating, these are common modes that would have been used when recording the great jazz players of the past

Getting Your Own

These days, builders of new jazz guitars are more scarce when we are looking for something that is affordable. The hand built luthiers still build amazing guitars, but the investment is way outside my reach. Eastman guitars are all built in China, but they are quite small and have an excellent reputation. The jazz boxes of theirs that I have tried were excellent. The D’Angelico that I own comes from overseas as well and is very nice, but they can be a bit scarce on the ground and their prices have gone up a fair bit recently. Ibanez does a couple of lines of jazz style guitars. Worth your trying out, but I am not a fan of their finishes although some of their George Benson non-signature versions are quite nice. I have tried the Godin line and while folks like them, they do nothing for me. I think that the Epiphone guitars in this space deliver excellent value for the money. They are made overseas of course, and can be limited in stores because to be honest, jazz boxes are not big movers for retailers. With the exception of my Joe Pass, I bought all of mine new, but encourage you to look at used from a reputable seller. I am sure that the seller made good margin on the Joe Pass because it had been a trade in, but the purchase price was fair to me and it plays like a charm.

In Summary

You may not see yourself as a jazz player. That’s ok. Something funny happens to me when I pick up a jazz box. I stop playing my common blues runs or rock tunes. I start working with different chord structures and voicings. It takes me to a different place, not better or worse then where I typically play, but very open and quite freeing. Works for me anyway.

If you are not familiar with jazz guitar, I would encourage you to listen to a Tal Farlow best of playlist. There’s a good one on Apple Music. Then try some Lee Ritenour and Larry Coryell. Joe Pass is amazing for the fast stuff and if you can find a decent Pat Martino recording where the keyboard player is not drowning him out, it’s very special. Wes Montgomery is another good pick. I’m not trying to change your fave, just perhaps broaden your exposure a bit. Thank you as always for reading and until next time, peace.