Fender | RRP $759.00
Single-pickup electric guitars are an icon in the rock and roll world. All tone, no complexity, and simple routing because it’s all you need. The Gretsch Electromatic Jet Club 1 Pickup is no exception to this rule, offering Gretsch’s famed Jet body shape in a tidy, well-designed package. With a chambered mahogany body paired with a PureVolt™ Twin Six™ Humbucker, the Jet Club 1 Pickup is a machine built for tone, expanding the ever-affordable and accessible Electromatic line.
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Gretsch’s range of Jets has been played by artists from every genre, from softer soul and blues to hard rockers like AC/DC, The Living End and beyond. Most often featuring a chambered design, the Electromatic® Jet™ Club 1 Pickup builds on a stellar heritage, with a lot to gain from such a simple design.
In your hands, this guitar is reasonably light, despite the weighty choice of mahogany for both the neck and body. The chambered design serves two purposes here: alleviating the weight, but adding characterful chime to the midrange thanks to the added acoustic quality of a chambered body. Chambered differs from hollow and semi-hollow designs in that there are no sound holes (like F-holes) for the sound to bounce out of, so the acoustic-ness is a bit more mellow. It melds the solid-body sound with unmistakable brightness. The resulting tone is bright and vibrant, with a mellow snap to round it out. Even unplugged, this guitar sings, the resonance of the chambered body both feeling and sounding great.
The neck is a ‘Performance “C”’ shape, sitting somewhere between thin, fast modern neck shapes and more vintage-correct U-shapes that require a bit more work to wrangle. This means the Electromatic® Jet™ Club 1 Pickup will feel equally comfortable for players of vintage-style guitars and modern axes alike, allowing you to flit and fly around the board if need be. The whole guitar kept in tune well, resonated nicely, and the curves felt comfortable when nestled into my body while playing. Nothing was in the way, and I felt at ease, with good access to everything I needed and able to focus on my playing.
The neck itself makes fretting easy from tip to top, the cutaway providing great access to the upper frets, the neck shape providing comfy fretting for lower frets for our cowboy chord devotees. The addition of a GraphTech nut provides the snap and clarity of bone, albeit in a more sustainable way. Subtle binding on the headstock and teardrop pickguard adds to the experience, the Electromatic® Jet™ Club 1 Pickup being available in either metallic Steel Olive or Claret Burst.
Tonally, the PureVolt™ Twin Six™ Humbucker is punchy and gritty, cleaning up nicely and offering warmer, sultry jazz tones if needed. The placement in the bridge position makes it innately brighter than anywhere else, but rolling off the tone warms things back up, replacing most of the need for a neck pickup anyway! The single pickup does away with the need for switching, featuring just a master tone control and master volume, the latter featuring a treble bleed circuit. Traditionally, pots used as master volumes don’t roll down volume as you might expect, instead rolling off the treble at a faster rate than the rest of the frequency spectrum. Commonly found on Telecasters and the like, the treble bleed circuit allows more treble to bleed in as volume is rolled off, effectively retaining the tone and rolling off the volume in a more linear fashion.
The treble bleed circuit accompanies the aforementioned master volume and master tone control. They’re located on the face of the guitar with a LockDown™ Locking Bridge at one end and six Die-Cast Sealed, three-a-side on the larger style of headstock from Gretsch, usually reserved for Penguins, Falcons and larger-bodied acoustics in the range. The bound rosewood fretboard features classic Gretsch stylings in the Neoclassical thumbnail inlays, notifying you which of the 22 Medium Jumbo frets you’re currently wailing on. The frets themselves, straight out of the box, were well set up, even and smooth, great for bends and vibrato.
They’re radiused to 12” for a modern feel, the 24.75” scale length of the guitar feeling familiar to players of single-cut guitars and other Jet-style guitars from Gretsch.
All in all the Electromatic® Jet™ Club 1 Pickup is a workhorse. The single pickup provides clarity and punch, and you won’t be bogged down with complicated wiring or switching, nor will you be lacking in the tone department. The chambered mahogany borrows the warmth and richness from the wood so widely known for its character, the chambered design helping to alleviate the weight while giving character to the wood and resulting in a unique sound.
Classic Gretsch design philosophy is combined with modern appointments in this no-nonsense addition to the Electromatic range, all comin’ atcha in the Gretsch Electromatic Jet Club 1 Pickup.
