Let’s Talk Offsets

Image Courtesy Suhr Guitars - This is the model that I have, the JM Classic with vibrato tailpiece and Suhr humbuckers

Hello folks. In this article I want to talk with you about offsets, the guitar shape that is by design asymmetrical. You’ve seen them, maybe played one or if lucky, own one, but if you do, then you “know”.

The Introduction of the Offset

As guitarists and bassists, we give a lot of credit to Leo Fender and his team for really innovative thinking. From the basic brilliance of the Telecaster and the Precision Bass, to the spacey first release of the Stratocaster now in its seventieth year of production, Mr. Fender had incredible impact on all of us, and yet he didn’t play an instrument. He did have the good sense to have strong musicians on his team, and rather than try to build a different version of an existing mousetrap, consistently took a different approach. Some times that failed, but like other musical instruments, his vision was excellent but too early for the masses. The offset guitar and the subsequent offset guitars and basses are one example.

Surpassing the Stratocaster

Image Courtesy Fender Musical Instruments Corp.  This American Professional II is about as close as you can get to the original release.  

The Stratocaster is a proven winner. It has lived longer than its best known rival the Gibson Les Paul. The original Les Paul was changed in 1961 and did not reappear in its natural form until the late sixties. The Strat has always been here. But Leo wanted to attract a different musician to his company’s products and considering the time, the high end musician didn’t play pop or MOR or rock and roll, that musician played jazz.

When most of us think jazz guitar, we think of the big bodied “jazz box” styles. Hollow body guitars of great design from companies like D’Angelico, Epiphone and Gibson. Warm, prone to feedback but providing the capability of very fast necks with clean amplification. Think of Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Pat Martino, or Lee Ritenour, Pat Metheny, Wes Montgomery and one of my personal favourites the brilliant Tal Farlow who was doing two hand tapping before the brilliant Edward Van Halen was born. When you picture those players, then and now, you picture the jazz box. But Leo Fender wanted those guys playing Fenders.

Mr. Fender knew his shop was not going to do hollow body archtops. The construction is difficult and expensive, particularly if solid tops and backs and not laminates are to be used. The body designs require a lot of fine work, and installing the electronics is most easy if you have three hands, each with foot long spider fingers and the ability to force an eyeball into a narrowly cut f hole. So rather than trying to do that, he took a different approach and started with the ideas from the Stratocaster.

He noted that most jazzers played sitting down, not standing, and he realized that the design of the Stratocaster was not optimal for that playing position. He also noted that jazz players tended to hold the neck at a higher angle than country or rock players, with the headstock closer to head level that waist level. He also knew that the big jazz boxes were also not ideal for play sitting but their big lower bouts could rest between the thighs for the desired cant. So he pulled the top of the Strat style body towards the headstock and the bottom backward, creating what we call the offset design.

Fender did not have humbucking pickups at the time, so as part of the process, the Fender single coil pickups were redesigned into something different with a much wider bobbin and a different winding model. There would be a volume and tone control and a pickup selector, but there would also be a mode where the tone was much less bright with a different set of switches to control the sound. The lower wind pickups would be less inclined to overdrive Fender’s amps of the day and would produce a lovely warm clean sound. Some called fast runs played on this style burbling. It’s a great word and does describe fast runs in jazz style.

The first iteration was priced higher and had a fancier build than the Stratocaster and was called the Jazzmaster. It was, and is, a wonderful guitar. The only bad news is that the jazz players didn’t show up for it.

The Other Fender Offsets

Image Courtesy Fender Musical Instrument Corp.  This is an image of my 60th Anniversary Jaguar

After the Jazzmaster I would list the Jaguar. It is similar to a Jazzmaster in that it has two tone stacks, but instead of a three way switch, it has on/off slider switches for each pickup and the third switch often called the “strangle switch” really sounds like it is strangling the output. I have never personally found a use for this. Because the Jaguar is a short scale guitar, bends are really easy and it is massively comfortable to play.

There are two other Fenders built on a smaller scale, the Mustang and the Duo-Sonic that are sometimes called offsets, but they are more like smaller Strats.

The Resurgence, or Perhaps the Wakeup

Jazzmasters and Jaguars began to appear on stages when used versions were the most affordable guitars around for young musicians and this also happened in the nineteen seventies when both Fender and Gibson were run by big corporations and quality had hit the bottom. Pop and punk players were picking up these offsets and using them to make music, and then the alternative folks picked them up. Smaller bodied persons who found the short scale length of the Jaguar appealing drove prices for used models from nearly nothing into the stratosphere. Today, most of us can name at least one guitarist known for favouring an offset body instrument.

Then some very interesting things started to happen. Fender started building reissues, putting back the two different tone stacks in Jazzmasters, and returning the “strangle” switch to Jaguars, and these guitars sold well. Never at the levels of Telecasters or Stratocasters but far better than they had originally. Then prestigious electric guitar companies driven by luthiers and quality instead of volume, started making their own offset guitars. I reference companies like Tom Anderson Guitarworks and Suhr Guitars as examples. I own a 60th Anniversary Jaguar and a 60th Jazzmaster but my most played offset is a Suhr JM. I wonder what the JM is supposed to imply? They are very different. The Jazzmaster has two wide bobbin single coils, although I replaced the factory pickups with ones from Jason Lollar. My Jaguar has two narrow bobbin single coils in what is called a sawtooth mount that have a sound unlike any other guitar and my Suhr has a pair of low wind SSV humbuckers.

Most offsets have some form of vibrato. The original Fender versions used a large plate that included the string anchors. Some had locks that would prevent the vibrato from moving if the player engaged the lock. The vibrato is generally smoother and more subtle than a traditional Fender six screw vibrato on a Strat, The Suhr uses a two point vibrato tailpiece, and it is the perfect combination of subtlety and light touch.

Like any guitar, the sound is what you make of it. I am no great player, but enjoy creating ambient tones, jazzy runs and inverted chording as well as from time to time going full Nirvana. The beauty of these offsets is that I have not found anything that they don’t do well at if the player engages. As I get older, I tend to play more sitting than standing, and the old Arthur Itis appears more frequently and earnestly in my wrists and hands these days and I find that the way the offset balances alleviates that a great deal. Not quite as well as a .strandberg, but better than other solid bodies, so that may be something worth checking out if like me, you aren’t prepared to pack in music just because you have more years behind you than in front of you.

Image Courtesy Tom Anderson Guitarworks - The is the Raven.  Tom Anderson guitars are all made to buyer spec, offering a wide choice of pickups

Example Tones

For these admittedly amateur samples, I used my Suhr JM into a Universal Audio Dream 65 amp box in stock 65 Deluxe Reverb simulation. I used the spring reverb in the Dream 65 because it is really nice. I disabled the internal cabinet emulation, instead opting to use the cabinet and microphone options from the Universal Audio OX pedal modifying this to use two microphones, a U67 condenser and a 121 ribbon on the Oxford speaker in the blackface Deluxe 1x12 cabinet. This signal went straight into the DAW. As I was not doing a review of a particular guitar, I did use a UNISON API 2500 channel strip in the live recording into LUNA. Due to some oddities with my UA plugins, I exported the AIFF files and then imported them to Logic Pro. Then I added a UA 1176 compressor plugin on a buss, sending the left and right channels to the buss and the stereo out. This allows me to mix the uncompressed and compressed signal to suit me. I then added some tape delay using a UA Galaxy delay plugin on its own buss, again sending the original left and right channels to both the stereo out and to the Galaxy. The Galaxy is UA’s implementation of the Roland Space Echo and was in fact called that until Roland requested a name change so as not to create confusion with their own pedal that appeared a couple of years later. It is an excellent emulation of a classic tape echo system. Finally in the mastering phase I used IZOTOPE Ozone for that final mastering before exporting to MP3 for this article. Too much work for a short basic demo? Probably, but I enjoy this kind of thing.

Wrapping Up

Clearly, I am a fan of offsets. Does that mean you should own one? Not necessarily but this article may encourage you to get outside the “normal” box and try something that not only sounds different but also plays differently. The worst thing that you learn is that it’s not for you. But, what if it is?

I really enjoy a nice offset. I have found that you can get a great Fender Jazzmaster, but you will need to play a few because in my experience, the quality is inconsistent. The same is true for Jaguars, unless either comes out of the Fender Custom Shop. I heartily encourage trying a Vintera or Player II out of the Mexico factory although you may not get the second tone stack. The Squier Classic Vibe 70’s Jazzmaster is a really nice entry level instrument but for the top in the offset world, you go to a Suhr Classic JM or a Tom Anderson Raven. Neither is inexpensive and as they are typically build to order, the wait time can be a while. My Classic JM took just under two years to arrive. If you are in America, Sweetwater now carries Suhr and have stock on hand.

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