Review : Fender Player Plus Meteora

When the Meteora first appeared, it was part of Fender’s Parallel Universe grouping and I’m told that stores couldn’t keep them in stock. Then they became a standard item in the Player Plus line and they hung around, and still do with very limited traction. Now they are part of the Ultra II framework and many stores I have spoken with are antsy because they have had Player Plus versions hanging around, literally, for years. Why has the Meteora gone from hot to not from a buyer perspective and what makes Fender think that people will spend over $3000 for a guitar that doesn’t sell at around $1300.

I was curious so I worked with The Arts Music Store to get some time with a Player Plus Meteora to try to find out if there’s something not right, or if people are missing a great rock guitar.

First Impressions

The Meteora body is an offset shape with a standard Fender scale length but instead of single coils has Fender’s Fireball Humbuckers. It has a 12” radius on the maple (Sunburst and Silverburst) or pau ferro (Belair Blue, Fiesta Red or Cosmic Jade) fingerboard so bends never fret out, has a very smooth two point vibrato, locking tuners and an S1 switch that does a real coil split of the humbuckers. The fingerboard edges are rolled and the neck carve is the popular Fender Modern C. Okay, it does come with Fender’s crappy stock strings, but so does every other guitar the big F puts out, and decent strings are cheap and easy to install. Time to unbox it and see what I discover.

I will say that Fender has spent no time on the web page for the guitar. It’s sparse to the point of nearly useless. But that’s an industry issue, not solely with Fender. With more people making purchase decisions without actually seeing a guitar live, let alone playing one to see if it suits, is that a real problem?

Could it be something as dumb as the fact that its shape is different? It’s not shaped like a Strat, a Tele or a Jazzmaster. It’s actually a fairly aggressive body shape and with those two humbuckers that should be attractive to some buyers.

Specifications

Fender gets a LAME-O award for not publishing useful specs. In fact, what I said in the First Impressions is a lot more than they publish about this Meteora. For a company so focused on messaging and placement, they treat the Player Plus Meteora like a bastard step child, which is goofy considering it has been added to the Ultra II line as both a guitar and a bass. It’s built in Fender’s Ensenada Mexico factory where very good work is done, and in my opinion, until very recently at least as good as if not better than the Corona California factory. That doesn’t mean that Mexico has slipped it’s that Corona has gotten their head unstuck and the recent American builds are significant improvements in build quality.

The instrument I received is in the Silverburst finish and I like the look very much. It’s a cross between a Silverback Gorilla and a film Werewolf. The shape is bold and it is one place where the CBS sized headstock doesn’t look foolish.

Each pickup has a dedicated tone pot and there is a single master volume pot. Pickup selection is via a three way switch on the upper bout as you would find on a Les Paul. Despite their hot name, I did not find the pickups overly hot, and they don’t push cleaner amps into natural overdrive easily. However, it does mean that they clean up nicely and have more headroom than a pickup with a 15K DC resistance. I don’t see this as a big deal because I think that there are somewhere around 300,000 different dirt pedals in the market. You could probably find something cheap if you wanted more grunt and grind.

The bridge has individual steel saddles of the modern design that I much prefer to the 70+ year old stamped bent saddles with those height adjusters sharp enough to gouge the edge of your hand. The vibrato is a very smooth two point system, just like the one found on the Ultra series in design.

Playability

I wanted to see how the guitar would do into an amp that does a nice clean with a bit of burn but can get very dirty without a pedal so I used my PRS HDRX 20 into a PRS 2x12 Stealth cabinet for most of my play testing. The pickups look like Seth Lover’s Wide Range humbuckers but don’t sound like them, They are more a rocker pickup in my opinion, more Gibson-esque than the Wide Range Fenders.

I beat on Fender pretty hard the last few years for what I will politely call really shitty fretwork. Uneven frets with sharp ends were the norm not the exception, even on American built guitars. You had to spend Custom Shop money to get decent fretwork out of a Fender decal product. Squier Classic Vibe guitars had better fretwork for a while. The Player Plus Meteora debuted in 2022 after the COVID idiocy had pretty much ended and so too had the “buy any guitar at any price” buyer mentality. At this time, makers had to stop pushing guitars out the door and learn again how to spell and deliver quality. Fender was not alone in this sin, but given their size, they were very obvious about lack of attention to detail. The Meteora I am reviewing has been around for a bit and is not a current year build, and is indicative of most of the Player Plus Meteoras that you will find on hooks in guitar shops.

The balance when sitting or playing standing with a strap is excellent. Light like a Strat but with the punch of an SG. It’s a very pleasing guitar to play and the neck is very comfortable. I encountered no fatigue or triggering of arthritis pain in the time that I was playing the guitar.

Sample Sounds

The following samples were recorded using the Meteora plugged into a PRS HDRX 20 tube head and feature only in amp overdrive. There are a PRS Mary Cries compressor and a Universal Audio DelVerb between the guitar and the amp. The signal comes in two channels from a Torpedo Captor X using the Two Notes Marshall 1960A cabinet, recorded with a Shure SM57 and a condenser microphone. Both selections use a Helios Type 69 preamp and a UA-6176 Channel Strip. The two selections are set differently in the preamp and the channel strip. Everything gets mastered using Isotope Ozone before being written out to MP3. I did not record clean tones, because while they are great, I wanted to focus on this instrument’s capability for higher gain music. The first selection is the bridge pickup, tone wide open and the second is the neck pickup, tone wide open.

Wrapping Up

As I write this, Player Plus Meteoras are marked down to $1309 CAD and this looks to be a Fender driven event. I came away impressed. It looks great, plays great and while the Fireball pickups are not as hot as their name implies, they do mid to high gain very well. All the tones were made in the amp, no overdrive or distortion.

The Meteora is not your typical Fender sound. It doesn’t do the single coil thing. However if you are looking for something that does heavy very well but where the cleans never get muddy, you should try one out. The build quality is really high, similar to the quality of the new Player II series. While I would never spend in the range of the Ultra II line, at this price point, the Player Plus Meteora is in my opinion, an excellent guitar.

Having spent time with this guitar, I cannot figure out why the Meteora went from hot to not because it is a very solid rock guitar with great playability and sound in the dual humbucker game. If this is your kind of thing, you should definitely check one out. If you can, please support The Arts Music Store because they support the channel and thus you by making instruments available for review.

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