Review : Fender Jazzmaster Gold Foil

Coming into this evaluation, I had zero experience with gold foil pickups, so I don’t really have any frame of reference other than this guitar, compared to other guitars with different pickups. I am a fan of the Jazzmaster and my 1965 Reissue has Lindy Fralin Jazzmaster pickups, while my 2021 FSR Jazzmaster with the rosewood neck has whatever Fender installed in it, basically two Fender Jazzmaster pickups of unknown configuration. Those guitars are quite different and pleasingly so is this one.

About Gold Foil Pickups

Fender does not disclose much about their own gold foil pickups, so I went in search of history on this type of pickup and used sources from all over the web. Much of the useful factual data, as opposed to subjective opinion comes from Lollar Pickups, a company that has been making gold foils for a long time.

Gold foil pickups debuted in the 1950s. There are still arguments if they first came from the DeArmond company or from the Japanese company Teisco. We do know that gold foil pickups were standard issue in guitars from Harmony, Kay, Silvertone and Guyatone. You immediately notice that the big guitar names of the day never offered gold foil options in those days.

Gold foil pickups came and still come as both single coils and as humbuckers depending on the maker.

Let’s get the emotional subjectivity on the table quickly so we can move past it. The topic of gold foil is very polarizing. Some players love the sound that they bring, while others don’t and refer to them as an outdated design with no value over more modern design that only follow form and not function. I don’t have a particular bias in this regard, to me, they are just another kind of pickup and I will either like the sound of them in a particular guitar or I won’t, and that is all there is to it.

Gold foils are typically lower output than their more common single coil and humbucker cousins. They tend to use a thinner wire for the winds, and the magnets are ferrite wrapped in rubber. This reduced output brings a benefit in that the harmonic range and string to string balance in a gold foil is often superior to a pickup with pole pieces or upper bar magnets. I heard this before doing the research in the hope to avoid creating an artificial mental bias. I will say, I hear it with a clean amp, but that harmonic richness falls off as overdrive comes into play and aggressive distortion, fuzz or modulations kill it off very quickly, given my extremely limited sample set.

The gold foils tend to be much more responsive to variations in pick attack in addition to being more sensitive to changes in the volume and tone pot settings.

Perhaps the most famous guitarist who is an advocate of gold foils is Ry Cooder. Many collectors and players hunt down old guitars with gold foils to get that “vintage” sound, but like most older pickups that were handwound, the sound of individual pickups from the same provider varies enormously. In this as well as most things, vintage is just lipstick on the word old.

The biggest misunderstanding is in the name. There is no gold in a gold foil pickup. What looks like gold screening is just aluminum backed by paper and coated with a gold finish. They may look pretty but their sound is entirely due to the coil orientation and those rubber wrapped ferrite magnets. Thus gold foils sound like any other foil pickups using the same construction model. More Elizabeth Arden than Seth Lover.

Guitar Construction

Moving to this Fender Gold Foil Jazzmaster, we find a solid mahogany body with a 4 bolt maple neck with an ebony fingerboard. It is is a classic Jazzmaster offset body, but there are some layout differences. You will immediately not the absence of the “jazz” controls on the upper bout. I tend to grab the neck first and this is where I found a big difference over my other Jazzmasters. The fingerboard is bound with white plastic and has average height narrow frets. On my example, none of the frets were poking into or through the binding, but the edge of the binding at the fretboard is sharper than I have ever encountered. While one may prefer a more rounded or rolled edge, you find a hard angle here and if you are prone to use the binding - fretboard edge as an index or hand sliding tool, you aren’t going to like the feel.

There are three gold foil pickups arranged parallel to each other in the neck, middle, bridge model. Each pickup is controlled by its own dedicated on off slider. Fender refers to these as Gold Foil Mini Humbuckers. Turning all the pickups off is equivalent to a kill option. The position of the switches are more like a Jaguar than any Jazzmaster. They work just fine, but they are not silent when switching. There is a single volume and a single tone control. Both controls are very smooth and their movement is aided further by the easily gripped pilgrim hat knobs. The output jack is on the front of the guitar and you must use an angled plug on your cable unless you want to interfere with the Bigsby B50 tailpiece. I personally find the positioning of the volume and tone controls less than optimal. The volume control is set forward and away from the bridge so volume swells are going to be challenging if you do not have long spider fingers. My personal opinion is that the controls are placed more in a fire and forget orientation than one where the player uses them a lot, and if the arm of the B50 is in a usable position, that position interferes with the use of the controls. The control pots are in the same position as on my other Jazzmasters so while the placement is not nearly as usable as on my Jaguar, it’s that wide Bigsby arm that becomes problematic on this instrument.

The pickguard/scratchplate on my sample is a very nice three ply faux tortoiseshell and all pickups, jack, controls and bridge are on the pickguard.

The bridge is a traditional Fender offset Jazzmaster bridge but uses polished steel barrels with a notch for the strings to ride as saddles as found in a Fender Mustang instead of those annoying “vintage” threaded rods. The bridge is quite decent, but not at the level of a Mastery bridge, which would, in my opinion, be a beneficial post purchase upgrade. Intonation is set individually for each string.

The tailpiece is a Bigsby B50. This means that the string mounting pins are spaced closer together than the notches on the bridge saddles. It works but is not a favourite design of mine. The B50 uses pins as a place to put the string ends. This means that unless you have a proven system for changing strings on these tailpieces, alcoholism and drug abuse are real threats. The spring is strong enough not to wobble, but does not have a variable compression rate and so tiny arm movements make for a lot of pitch change. Personally, I prefer the Fender Vibrato tailpieces on my Jazzmasters and Jaguar, but cosmetically the Bigsby looks more fashionable and much of this instrument is about fashion. I find that the arm gets in the way, and while there is a felt pad on the inside tip, once set up properly that arm has no particular “at rest no movement” option. Players will have to live with it.

The body finish on my example is a gorgeous Shoreline Gold in gloss poly with matching headstock. For those who don’t like the gorgeuous gold, there is a nice Candy Apple burst option. The back of the neck is satin urethane finished and super smooth. No grabbiness if your hands sweat here. The neck is a Fender ‘60s style C and the fingerboard has a 9.5 degree radius. The tuning pegs are all traditional non-staggered Fender units with white plastic buttons. The tuners are smooth enough, but if it were me, I would much prefer the Fender Locking Tuners by Schaller. They are an inexpensive upgrade for great simplicity and smoothness of action. The ebony board is very nice, but it has clearly been dyed as no ebony is that uniform. Not bad, but the finishing is lacking, fortunately an application of Monty’s Instrument Food will address that. The block inlays are very nice looking, not real pearl of course, as bad lighting reveals their mother of toilet seat origins. I’m not slagging on Fender, these inlays look as good as any other plastic inlay that you will encounter. The nut is synthetic bone. Fender refers to the frets as narrow tall. Since it is not stated, I presume that the frets are nickel and not stainless steel.

My initial sample had a headstock truss rod adjustment hole, but the Fender site and the products show that the neck must come off to adjust the truss rod. That may be vintage, but it’s a lousy design and another reason to not go this route when there are perfectly excellent offset alternatives where truss rod adjustments do not require disassembly.

The sample guitar came to me, as usual, from the great people at The Arts Music Store in Newmarket Ontario. Braeden did a professional setup on it before I picked it up and playability out of the included gig bag was superb with my usual qualification about Fender strings. To be blunt, I hate them. Even new ones are not smooth and feel like nasty wire. If this were my guitar they would come off to be replaced by a set of Curt Mangan or Stringjoy Balanced Tension 9.5 - 44s. Fender ships the guitar with 10 - 46 250R Nickel Plated Steel series strings. They may not be the cheapest strings on the planet but sure feel like they are. I did find that I had to adjust the neck during my evaluation period.

I will slag Fender on the included “case”. Fender markets it as a Deluxe Gig Bag. It’s actually a really cheaply made gig bag that is a bit snug in the wrong way and offers no significant protection. Knowing how Fender marks up accessories, they could have left it out completely and dropped the purchase price of the guitar $100, even though I have seen better $30 gig bags from China on Amazon. Consequently, if you are a gigging musician or take your guitar to different places to play, you will want to get a good case for this instrument. My personal recommendation for a gigging guitarist will be a MONO gig bag, or a hardshell case. If you are a travelling musician, you’ll be looking at an Anvil type road case anyway. Honestly the only case I consider a poorer offering is on the much more expensive PRS Silver Sky whose gig bag is the epitome of cheap ass crap.

Pickups and Switching

As I noted, each pickup has its own on off switch. I am used to that on the Jaguar and on the upper bout of my Jazzmasters. Sadly I find sliding switches somewhat vague, and I prefer a more positive feeling selector. Up is on, down is off, and I admittedly found that I had to be cautious when playing full chords as I inadvertently turned pickups off with a downstroke from time to time. That’s a user training thing, but something to be aware of. As you might suspect, changing pickup settings is not quick, a five position switch as on a Stratocaster would be a much better player oriented tool, but we have to remember that this is more an exercise in cosmetics as it is in playability.

Pickup and Switch Position Audio Samples

In the sample audio track that follows, I played a sequence of major chords starting at A and ending at G. The samples reference pickup selections in accordance with this list;

• Bridge Pickup Alone

• Middle Pickup Alone

• Neck Pickup Alone

• Bridge and Middle Pickup

• Middle and Neck Pickup

• Bridge and Neck Pickup

• Bridge, Middle and Neck Pickup

The gold foils do sound different in every case. The recording configuration was as follows;

• Guitar into Input 1 on the Quad Cortex

• Super Reverb amplifier preset as found on the Quad Cortex site. The preset contains the following settings

• Optical Mono Compressor (LA-2A) set to 4:1 at 100% Mix

• Fender Super Reverb Amplifier, bright switch on, tone stack neutral (equivalent to all knobs at 5)

• Fender 4 x 10 Speaker Cabinet IR with Shure SM57 on upper left speaker positioned offset 4 inches left and down at a distance of 6 inches from the grille cloth and Beyerdynamic 160 Ribbon on upper right speaker positioned offset 4 inches right and down at a distance of 3 inches from the grille cloth

• Stereo Sprint Reverb with mix at 35%, tone at 50% and spring efficiency at 100%

• Quad Cortex L and R out to L and R inputs on Apollo interface with no plugins active

• DAW is Logic Pro with each side having its own track. No plugins or signal modifications in Logic Pro at all

This is a very clean and unmodified signal, other than the compressor and the reverb, both of which are very common in recordings and that do not negatively impact the sound of the pickups singly or in combination.

Playing the Gold Foil Jazzmaster

If you are a Telecaster or Stratocaster afficianado, you will find this model heavy. This is expected given the mahogany body. An immediate benefit of that body wood is how resonant the guitar is. I always play any guitar unplugged because what I hear and feel, or don’t hear and feel, is only made stronger through amplification. Body wood, neck wood and fingerboard wood all matter whether acoustic, semi-hollow or solid body. I know that there are people who say they don’t but ask any credible luthier and will hear that wood matters. This Jazzmaster sings unplugged! It sounds fabulous. The only way it could be better in that regard, in my opinion, is if it came with a rosewood neck. I have a strong bias to rosewood necks and own a number of PRS guitars and Fender guitars specifically because I found models with rosewood necks. But as usual I digress.

I always put a strap on a guitar, because I know that if I don’t something awful will happen. The Jazzmaster has great balance and even with a simple leather strap it stays where you hang it. Once I got my hands “taught” about the sharp binding edge, the guitar is very comfortable to play standing or sitting. It’s one of the great things about Fender offsets in my opinion, they fit me really well.

I found that to get the most from any of the pickups, I had to be picking right over the selected pickup, which for single lines was not an issue but for general playing, I did run my pick into the surface of the centre pickup a lot. It’s wider but not taller than a Strat pickup and while it does get in my way if I am not paying attention, it’s not nearly as loathsome in terms of ramming a pick into as the middle pickup in my ‘61 Les Paul. I will say however, that the amount of mud generated when either the bridge/middle or neck/middle sets are engaged is a bit disappointing and all pickups on together did not appeal to me at all sounding as if the guitar were beneath the surface of a particularly filthy swamp. Thus for me, this beautiful guitar fails on plugged in tone in common selector options.

As noted previously, I have to pay attention to big chord downstrokes to avoid turning off a pickup. Even though the switches are in the same place as on my Jaguar, I don’t have that problem there, so it must have something to do with how I hold the guitar given the significant differences in scale length.

The pickups are really responsive to changes in pick attack and while lower output, handle thumb and finger playing really well. I need less compression when recording with these pickups than with hotter pickups as I find the transients less obvious. I also like the sound of these pickups in some selection positions, so long as I am using a clean amplifier. Into Fender amps, it’s very nice, and pretty darn good into the AC30 as well. Less so into an amplifier where the preamp is happy to overdrive quickly. I did not like it into my Marshalls or my Tone King Gremlin. It was fine into the PRS Dallas and very nice into the Clean Channel of my Boogie Mark V although I had to turn the Bright switch off on the Boogie. Out of all the physical amps that I played it through, I preferred the sound of the aged PRS Dallas, followed by a Blackface Fender Twin Reverb

The guitar sounds fine with overdrive and distortion and even with the wonderful fuzz from the Effectrode Mercury, but any distinction of using gold foils is lost there as far as I can hear. From my perspective, this guitar pairs best with a classic Fender blackface be that a Deluxe Reverb, a Twin Reverb or a Super Reverb.

My Final Thoughts

I like this guitar a lot. Fit and finish is excellent and while I don’t think it matters, it is built in Fender’s Mexico factory. The paint looks great and the gold foils are distinctive in a clean amp, but frankly not as distinct as I expected, given that I really didn’t know what to expect. Here in Canada, this guitar sells for just under two grand retail. If I did not already have a pair of Jazzmasters that cost about the same and that played and sounded better, it might be a decent first Jazzmaster. While the guitar was setup at the store, there is more work that I would want to do to improve tuning stability at the nut and at the bridge which would entail parts and labour costs. Given the Jaguar drawn pickup switching, I don’t care for where the body sits and while I notice the issue less on my other Jazzmasters, I find that wide Bigsby arm gets in the way. Moreover, and it may just be this particular example, I don’t like that sharp edge on the fretboard. Rolling the edge gently can certainly be done, but it would be a lot of work. I understand that Fender is rushing to get instruments out, but I think more QC time could have been spent on this to make it feel and play great. You could encounter an example that is superb. From a looks perspective, I think it is gorgeous, but looks don’t matter on record.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2024

Sharp eyed reader Rick pointed out that the stock photo from Fender does not show a truss rod adjustment at the headstock. The current Fender website does not either. I cannot explain why the unit I got the first week of arrival in Canada has a truss rod adjustment that did not require the neck to come off, but it did. However, given that Fender clearly shows this is not there in their product photos, I have removed that portion of my review. I certainly did adjust the truss rod on my sample, and did not take the neck off. So it goes.