Fender swaps the Tele’s twang for Player II Modified humbuckers, a Floyd Rose Special and a flat 12" ebony fingerboard in this limited edition.
The Fender Telecaster was the first commercially successful solidbody electric guitar, and to this day it epitomises the 1950s for a lot of players. It’s simple, elegant, restrained, a real meat-and-potatoes instrument that harks back to a simpler time, perfect for genres like country and blues.
Or, as the Limited Edition Player Fusion Telecaster HH Floyd Rose shows us, you can chuck a double-locking tremolo and some humbuckers on it so you can shred and chug like an absolute beast.
The Telecaster has established itself as a legendary workhorse, an icon of recorded sound, but there are things about it that present inherent challenges to players who need something more high-performance for modern styles. Think about what defines those early Teles: very round fingerboard radii which make it hard to bend notes on the higher frets. A very bright, low-output bridge pickup which buzzes like a wasp when you start adding gain. Difficult-to-intonate bridge saddles. And those early Teles and Nocasters had huge necks and tiny frets. The Tele is legendary, and guitarists have been making it work for them for 75 years now. But that’s not the only way to go.
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And so here we have a guitar that brings the Telecaster into the future… well, actually, if we’re being honest, it brings it up to the late ’80s, for the most part. But I digress. The Fusion HH Floyd Rose is part of Fender’s Limited Edition Player Fusion Series, a run of Mexican-made instruments that takes classic Fender shapes and pushes them towards heavier music. It’s a high-performance instrument made for those who want heavy, they want loud, they want a zippy neck and a tremolo system that lets you make motorbike and horse sounds.
We start with an alder body, one of the more typical Tele woods along with ash. The body is finished in gloss polyester and it’s super-shiny so you might want to keep those hands clean if you choose the black option instead of the Aura Metallic one. Either way the hardware is all black, which suits the guitar’s attitude perfectly, and Fender has fitted locking strap buttons, a very sensible inclusion on a guitar that’s likely to be thrown around on stage.
The neck is maple with a Thin “C” profile and an ebony fingerboard, no position dots on the fretboard face (don’t worry, there are still side dots), and a flatter 12″ radius, great for big wild bends and shreddable moments. It measures .790″ at the first fret and .825″ at the 12th, so it’s slim without feeling like a toothpick, and the 1.69″ nut width gives you a little more room than the Player II Tele’s 1.650″. The frets are jumbos and the back of the neck is satin urethane, giving the guitar a smooth, non-slick playing feel which will be a breath of fresh air for those who have been put off by glossy necks in the past. Scale length is the standard Fender 25.5″, so the string tension and snap will feel familiar to anyone coming from a Strat or a regular Tele.
The pickups are a pair of Fender Player II Modified humbuckers, high-output units designed primarily for more rockworthy, driven tones, which Fender says are voiced for tight lows and a powerful midrange. The three-way pickup selector gives you the option of bridge humbucker, neck humbucker or both, with a master volume and master tone keeping the control layout as simple as a Tele should be. There’s no coil-splitting, which keeps the guitar focused on what it does best, though players after single-coil sounds will want to keep that in mind.
The bridge is a Floyd Rose Special in black, paired with a Floyd Rose locking nut. This is the entry-level Floyd Rose bridge and while it works just fine it does have its detractors because it’s made of softer materials than the higher levels offered by Floyd Rose. Personally I’ve had no issues with the Floyd Rose Special in five years of owning my EVH Wolfgang Standard, but your mileage may vary. The bridge is full-floating, so you can pull up as well as dive, and with the nut locked down it’s built to hold its tuning through aggressive dive bombs and bends. The usual Floyd caveats apply: string changes take a little longer, and if you like to switch tunings mid-set you’ll want a second guitar on hand.
Sonically this is a LOUD guitar. It wants to shred, it wants to scream, it wants you to sustain a note and pump that whammy bar, or clamp down with your palm-muting and chug away with glee. The bridge pickup sounds fat and rich, playing nicely with anything from light overdrive to ultra mega distorto-meltdown. The neck pickup sounds full and rounded with just enough pick attack to let those John Petrucci licks speak. The middle setting is the subtlest of the three, and works best against a clean sound for an intro or verse before kicking into full Kill Mode.
It ships with a set of Fender USA 250L strings, .009 to .042, which suits the shred-friendly setup, though players who tune down for heavier riffs will probably want to go up a gauge or two and adjust the springs accordingly.
This is a really playable, really fun guitar with some heavy, harmonically interesting tones available, and the Floyd Rose Special seems to operate just fine under heavy whammy use. You’re certainly getting enough guitar right out of the box to be very happy with this instrument for a long time.
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