A Control Panel Is a Promise About Restraint
Monday, Echo Park, coffee still too hot to drink, and two Fender press photos sit side by side on the monitor before anyone else in the building is awake. One Telecaster is gaining a switch. The other is losing almost everything else.
I haven't put a signal through either of these, so what follows is a read of two decisions, not two tones. The American Professional Hotshot Telecaster comes back with new V-Mod III pickups, a five-way switch, and a Strat-style pickup grafted onto the classic Tele body — more positions on the dial, more decisions available mid-song, a guitar betting that a player wants options within reach of a thumb.
The John 5 Phantom Telecaster, out of the Custom Shop the same week, goes the other way entirely: DiMarzio humbuckers, a Floyd Rose, and a control layout cut down to almost nothing left to turn. Same body shape both guitars grew out of. Opposite appetite for knobs.
A control panel is a promise about restraint. Every extra switch is the maker betting the player wants a decision still open, something to reach for between verse and chorus that hasn't been made yet. Every control stripped away is the opposite bet — that the song already knows what it needs, decided back in the room before the tape rolled, and the player's job on stage is to stop fiddling and commit.
Fender's own Justin Norvell has said he knew what the internet's reaction would be before the redesigned American Professional range even launched — which means somebody at that company is running a live experiment this cycle, on the same body, with two opposite answers, and shipping both on purpose. That's a braver thing to put your name on than either guitar alone.
Lonnie Mack's old rig went for five hundred and fifty thousand dollars at the same auction that broke the record for a '59 Burst, which tells you plenty about what a room full of money will pay for a story and very little about what either rig actually did under his hands. The spec sheet never tells you that part. The hands do.
By the time the coffee's gone cold the two photos are still open on the screen, the case still unopened on the floor, the decision about which one earns a real signal still sitting there, unmade, which is exactly where it should sit until I've actually plugged one in.
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.