Review : Fender Ultra II Telecaster

I have to laugh sometimes because I am often accused of being a Fender Hater. And a Gibson Hater. Neither are true factually but I do hate any company that puts out poor quality at high prices and convinces otherwise smart people that the decal is a quality indicator. Fortunately, channel members and users tend to be smart at recognizing marketing foo foo dust.

As you will find here at thatguitarlover.com , I recently did reviews of the Player II Stratocaster and the Player II Jazz Bass. I found them both to be excellent instruments, with a great value for the cost. However, I have also been very critical of Fender when I found that most new USA built Fenders’ only innovation is a different colour of rattle can paint. That’s just a different colour of lipstick on the same sow. Plus the fretwork in past years has been pretty shit.

Thus when I was offered the opportunity to review the brand new Ultra II Telecaster, I jumped at the opportunity in the hopes that as the guitar market continues to soften, they would have brought their attention back to quality in their USA made products that did not come out of the overpriced and no real value added Custom Shop.

I am very glad that I did, because this guitar is very nice indeed..

Initial Thoughts

The instrument was provided to me for review with the direct engagement of Shane and Colin from The Arts Music Store. You should look into this shop, not because they always support my work, but because it is an excellent store with strong inventory on hand and a sales team that is both knowledgeable and friendly. No arrogant people at this store. Quite a refreshing difference from other places that I have been.

*Check out the belly cut and the significant improvement for upper fret access*

Shane recommended the Telecaster and Colin picked the colour which is a really beautiful subtle metallic medium green called Solar Flare. Sadly none of the Fender artwork for this colour does anything to show how great it actually looks. Fender should hire PRS’ photographers for their top line instruments. It came with a black aluminum anodized pickguard, Fender Noiseless Pickups, individually adjustable saddles and new to me, a very slim neck with a very aggressive D carve.

The guitar is nice and lightweight, hangs perfectly on a strap and looks the bomb. So back it has come to Chaos Central for the review.

I will confess to some hesitancy, because as Phil McKnight has said better than I, the Fender McMarketing machine was out in full force with tons of “its perfect” paid influencer reviews (If you get paid to review something by the manufacturer, you’ve become a prostitute whether you want to accept it or not) as well as the expected “excellent” reviews from Fender dealers who have to be positive because they want people to try these and buy them. He called it to be like an iPhone launch, lots of hype with little to say over the preceding Ultra release. While I concur that the differences between the Ultra and Ultra II are small, and to my mind certainly not worth trading or switching, there are some elements that I do like very much.

Specifications

Let’s talk a bit about the specifications that demonstrate why this is a top of the line instrument. The body wood is Alder which is a good choice for lighter bodies without needing chambering. However that the neck is Quartersawn Maple is a big deal. Quarter sawing is method that is used when rip sawing lumber to cut across the growth rings perpendicular to the rings themselves. This results in a neck that is least likely of all other cutting methods to warp or twist. It means that the log must be rotated for every pair of cuts, and this requires extra time and custom machinery compared to the normal method called flat sawn. To me as a guitar lover and wood geek, I will always prefer quarter sawn necks if available.

The guitar retains Fender’s standard 25.5” scale length but rather than a fixed 7.25” or 9.5” radius delivers a compound 10” to 14” radius on the fingerboard. Depending on the colour you choose you will get either quarter sawn maple or ebony for the fretboard. My instrument has ebony that looks great and is not dyed. Do note that Fender’s published specs (pasted above) do not mention the ebony fretboard.

The rear photos show the very aggressive belly carve and carve away that improves access to the upper frets.

Fender’s documentation sheets are pretty poorly detailed and it took some time to confirm that the frets are extremely highly polished nickel silver. I hoped that they would be stainless steel, but those are only available on the more expensive and older Ultra Luxe. Given that you get excellent stainless steel fretwork on $500 China made no name guitars, it is annoying that Fender wants you to spend $500 more to get a guitar with stainless steel frets. Typical Fender, nickel and diming their customers. However, the fretwork is very good, the best that I have seen on Fender USA guitars in at least five years. The pickups are the latest iteration of Fender Noiseless single coil Telecaster pickups I know that lots of people rename these pickups Fender Toneless, but in fairness they have gotten better over time. In an interview on Andertons, the product manager says that these pickups are the closest that they have ever gotten to regular single coils. His presentation was not particularly impressive. Plugged into the Kemper with a variety of amps and also into my blonde Deluxe Reverb, I did not find a significant difference over my 60th Anniversary Telecaster or my Custom Shop 1967 Telecaster in sound. Besides, amps have these knobs on them that you can turn if you think you are missing some sparkle.

*Shot in my living room to show a more accurate rendering of the fabulous colour*

The tuners are locking and very smooth to use. The nut is TUSQ and the bridge saddles are chromed brass. I would have preferred that they were not chromed, but so it goes. The metal volume and tone knobs are massively knurled and as someone who is constantly working volume and tone, I love the positive feel. The volume knob also features the Fender S-1 circuit which bypasses the three way switch and puts both pickups in serial wiring configuration.

I personally did not care for the all serial configuration. I experience a nominal volume loss and the sound became more generic. To each player, his or her own. What I do like is that Fender has included a proper Treble bleed on the volume pot and the tone pot has a notch just past full on that removes the tone pot from the signal path completely. That feature is a big deal to me.

The from the factory setup was acceptable. I found too much relief (3/32” at the 12th) to suit me and once I adjusted the truss rod to remove all relief, I found the playability had improved a lot from my perspective. Action was 2mm on the low E and 1.75mm on the high E afterwards which was acceptable to me. I used my fret rocker to check the frets for level and while the work is not perfect, they were level within the bounds of acceptability. As this is not my guitar, I did not do anything to improve the fret levelling but a qualified tech could do this relatively inexpensively. Of course, if you are not as picky as I am, you could be perfectly fine with the way that the guitar arrives.

In addition to the Solar Flare colour (represented so poorly in these images) the guitar is also available in Texas Tea with an ebony board and silver pickguard, Ultraburst with a maple board and an orangey looking pickguard, Avalanche (aka White) with a maple board and silver pickguard and Sinister Red with a maple board and black pickguard. If I were buying, I would choose the Solar Flare by a country mile. Lee Anderton called the colour a love or hate scenario, and both my daughter and I are committed to the love the colour group.

As noted in the specs above, the instrument comes in a hardshell case.

Playing Discoveries

*I really love the colour. The rest of the fit and finish is superb.*

I have to commend Fender right up front. This is a Telecaster, but it’s a modern and improved Telecaster, not just yet another rehash of a run of fake vintage stuff. It’s 2024 not 1951 and the world has moved on.

I wanted to get this guitar through a number of different amplifiers as quickly as I could in my first playing session. So for that I used my Kemper Stage and a number of Kemper Profiles that I already knew well. Most of the profiles came from Tone Junkie and while a couple were the new Liquid Profiles, most were of the older style. I started with a PRS Dallas, then a Fender 5E3 Tweed, then a Dumble ODS, then a 1972 Marshall Purple Plexi, then a VOX AC30 and the last amp for this session was a 65 Deluxe Reverb. Where the profiles were not of the liquid type, I have multiple options for input jacks, normal and bright channels and a variety of different volume levels. I did not find any profile that did not sound great and I did not experience the treble loss that I was accustomed to with older versions of the Fender Noiseless pickups. They sound fine to me, and I found no reason to consider changing them out.

It took me a while to get used to the very aggressive D carve on the very thin neck. The fretboard edges are nicely rolled but you may miss that at first if you are not used to thin necks. Even with my arthritis acting up on the day, I was able to play for over an hour without pain, and while I am more aligned to a thicker neck as on my PRS DGT, I did not find any issues with this neck the way that I do with the Ibanez super thin Wizard necks.

I prefer the compound radius fretboard. Bends never fretted out, and it is still very comfortable for barre chords in the first position. The body has an aggressive belly cut that I really liked and the body is relieved and the attachment contoured for easy access to the upper frets. Couple these updates with six individually adjustable saddles and you have a much more usable and functional guitar. You can load the strings from the back but there are holes if you want to top load your strings. Personal choice. Even the jack dish has been updated replacing the old style that would always come loose, twist out of alignment or lose the jack itself inside the body.

From a comfort perspective, once I acclimated to the thin neck, I found the guitar very comfortable. Telecaster purists will possible stroke out when they find that wonderfully deep belly carve, the super improvement in upper fret access and that the top rear bout has been shaved to make it more comfortable on the forearm. I consider all of these substantial improvements.

You will also come to appreciate that the pickup selector switch is now at an angle on the switch plate. It’s a small thing, but I think it improves playability.

While I maintain the ash trays on all my Telecasters that can take one, having no need to shred the side of my hand on saddle grub screws, I like that the bridge plate has no raised sides and that while I will often rest the side of my picking hand at the saddles, to make muting quick, I did not feel the saddle height screws digging in at all.

Acoustically, the guitar sounds pretty good. About as much as I would expect from decent Alder which is not a particularly resonant wood in any case. However, it is an electric guitar and so the majority of its sound will come from the pickups. I cannot tell because the finish is opaque, how many pieces of alder make up the body.

The script logo decal is gold coloured, a bit more understated than the common black script. I think it looks appropriate.

Sample Sounds

I found that this guitar sounded really great through a wide variety of amps. While I really favoured the sound of it with my Fender 5E3 profiles from Tone Junkie in my Kemper, I decided to record it with the Fender Tonemaster Blonde Super Reverb and its regular pedal board. The signal went from the guitar to an amp selector (the superb Radial xxx) and then to board so all the effects were in front of the amp. From the amp, it went from the DI output on the amp using Fender’s 1x12 cab sim to a UA Apollo Twin interface and was recorded in UA’s LUNA DAW. I alternate between LUNA and Logic Pro, but I like LUNA because I can put a channel strip in place during the recording. For these examples, I used a Helios 69 channel strip in the UNISON slot. The first track is the guitar clean and the second includes an Xotic Soul Driven for some gentle overdrive. There is a bit of floor noise from this pedal that you may notice. I created a bus in LUNA and placed a UA6176 EQ/Compressor there. The final mix was done to MP3 with a fixed bit rate.

Wrapping Up

This is a really fine guitar. For those willing to part with the cost of acquisition, I would say it is very good for Fender USA product. I think that the fretwork could be improved from a levelling perspective, but I also acknowledge being VERY picky. Sure I would replace that horrible stamped string tree with a Tusq one, and of course cut off the barbed wire factory strings immediately and replace them with a set of my custom Curt Mangan strings, but I would do that to any guitar from Fender. MAP for the Solar Flare coloured version is $2,969 CAD and all the other colours have a MAP of $3,039. That’s a lot of money for most, and you really have to be willing to pay the premium to buy this Telecaster. If all the advantages in the bridge, the pickups, the tuners and the body are not compelling, you could save a lot of money and get yourself a Player II Telecaster and be very happy indeed. However, for those who demand a Fender Corona California built instrument that evokes the nineteen fifties but is a significantly improved version over that plus 70 year old design, this is a very good choice. This is a very fine US built Fender instrument without the Custom Shop Sucker Tax.

If you want to get yourself one, please consider buying from The Arts Music Store, either live in person or via their online store. They help me get units to share reviews with you and I would appreciate it if you choose to support the store.

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