The Vintage brand sets out to boost its indie street cred by adding an offset-waist solidbody to its pre-roughed-up Icon series – does it sound as ‘alternative’ as it looks?
Vintage s has been steadily building its reputation since the mid-1990s, when beginner brand Encore decided to add something more upmarket to its roster. Soon established as an entity apart from the Encore stable, Vintage made its name mixing homegrown design ingenuity with overseas manufacturing to deliver impressive value for money.
Nowadays the British-owned brand is well on board with the ‘relic’ craze, through its ever-expanding Icon series – and that brings us to this new, distressed version of the Jazzmaster-inspired V65.
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Marrying the tastefully battered look of a classic offset-waist Fender with the nuts, bolts and electronics of a modern thoroughbred, the V65V features the time-tested combination of an alder body and a bolt-on maple neck. That ensures familiarity for offset aficionados but you’re also getting Trev Wilkinson-designed metalwork (including a roller bridge) and a slippery Graph Tech nut.
Cosmetically, this – with an appearance that suggests decades of use and abuse – may prove divisive. The body’s matte finish has been purposefully worn by the luthiers at the Vintage factory, with pretty major scuffs and scrapes on the front, sides and back.
The worn look doesn’t stop there either: the back of the neck has been sanded down too. There’s little trace of the original glossy finish except at the extremes of the upper and lower registers, which should in theory enable players to skip the years-long process of playing the neck in themselves.
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Wilkinson’s award-winning design team provides the hardware and electronics, continuing a longstanding relationship with the Vintage brand. This features a pair of P-90-inspired Soapbar pickups, rather than the typical Jazzmaster-style single-coils you might expect, plus Wilkinson WJ55 tuners. A Vintage tailpiece with an extra-long arm is meant to inspire shimmery chord work and wild single-note vibrato. Let’s see if it does…
Plugged into a clean black-panel amplifier, the twangy nature of these pickups is immediately evident in the bridge position, which causes us to reach for the treble knob on the amp right away. Switching to the middle or neck position warms things up significantly and, with the addition of some spring reverb, we’re in blissful clean tone territory.
This shines thanks to the ability to add subtle, textural vibrato via that long arm. The added motion to the ringing tails of chord work makes for seriously sweet-sounding progressions, putting everything from jangly indie to dark post-rock tonalities well within the player’s grasp.
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Adding drive to our signal chain, the V65V springs to life sonically, with that bridge position becoming eminently usable again in conjunction with a Fulltone OCD placed in front of the amp. With some fuzz thrown into the mix, great garage-rock riffing abounds, with plenty of sustain for lead licks and excellent chordal clarity.
The ready-worn feel of the neck makes it extraordinarily comfortable from the get-go, one benefit of a relic job that you’d be forgiven for thinking was purely an exercise in aesthetics. The wearing of the finish on the back makes this feel oddly familiar, and its vintage C profile doesn’t feel too slim in the hand, with a chunkier feel than the specs suggest.
Though the V65V doesn’t sport locking tuners, the Wilkinson WJ55s do a remarkably good job of holding the tuning down – in spite of our heavy leaning on the vibrato arm during an excitable session. Even after some seriously harsh whammy play, the tuning required only a slight adjustment.
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The bridge on our review instrument did buzz a bit, particularly as we moved further up the neck, but this was only really noticeable when playing unplugged. For the most part the roller saddles on the Wilkinson bridge cope extremely well at preventing the string-slip that’s often a problem with this kind of ultra-shallow break angle – though we did pop the low E string out of its groove a few times.
Anyone familiar with traditional offsets will know to expect this and, for many players, the bridge design is key to the sound of this type of . It certainly doesn’t detract from the overall playing experience of the V65V, which is good fun, versatile enough for a variety of styles, and an inspiring option for those looking to make their first inroads into the enigmatic world of the offset.Are the superior sonics commonly attributed to vintage electric s a happy consequence of the ageing process, or did golden-era instruments always sound that way?
The secret of vintage tone is old wood, right? It’s certainly a belief prevalent in vintage- circles and there are thriving businesses predicated on that hypothesis. But must you have vintage wood and, by extension, vintage s to achieve authentic vintage tone? And secondly, do electric s improve with age?
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Let’s begin with Les Paul ‘conversions’ as a case study. For the uninitiated, this is an increasingly popular practice than involves taking a ‘lesser’ 1950s – or sometimes late 1960s – Les Paul and using it as a donor to convert to 1958-’60 Les Paul Standard, aka Burst, specifications. Les Paul conversions are particularly interesting, because they’re a unique instance of major structural alterations and total refinishes being deemed acceptable to tone hounds. In effect, they test the ‘old wood’ hypothesis to destruction… sometimes literally.
Owning a real Burst is sheer fantasy for most of us, but a mid-50s Goldtop is a couple of PAFs and maybe a bridge away from being essentially the same . Countless Goldtops have been converted into faux Bursts in recent times and it certainly makes sense financially, but can the same be said from a playing perspective?
I recently tested this out with a friend’s ’53/’59 conversion loaded with vintage hardware and a set of modern PAF replica pickups. The converted instrument sounded a little flat and nowhere near as good as his Gibson Custom Collector’s Choice LP, also loaded with vintage hardware but additionally, a set of genuine vintage PAFs.
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Unplugged, it was a different story – the conversion had a richer resonance and noticeably longer sustain. But as much as I appreciate the unplugged tone of a fine Les Paul, I think most ists will agree they sound better plugged in.
We transferred the PAFs to the conversion and it came to life. It also sounded better than the Collector’s Choice model when fitted with the same pickups, because the PAFs allowed its superior acoustic qualities to come through. This establishes two things. The wood itself cannot be disregarded entirely, but a recently manufactured Burst repro with a set of original PAFs and hardware can sound better than a genuine 1950s Les Paul with reproduction pickups.
I’ve conducted similar tests using a couple of original ’54 Goldtops and a Greco Goldtop conversion loaded with a set of 1953 P-90s and a 1950s wrapover bridge. I’ve even compared a Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster with a vintage bridge and a fully loaded vintage pickguard against an original ’63 Strat and installed genuine PAFs in a 1981 Greco.
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Consistent results lead to clear conclusions. Providing the wood is of the correct type and of a similar weight, newer electric s equipped with vintage pickups and hardware can often sound almost indistinguishable from all-original vintage models. They can also sound superior to vintage s that have lost their original pickups and hardware.
On rare occasions, we encounter vintage s that are undeniably mind-blowing. It might seem plausible to attribute such great tone to the seasoning effects of age, but could that be a naïve and lazy assumption?
During our recent conversation, vintage-obsessed YouTube stars Doug and Pat made this telling point: “We might subscribe to the tonal differences being down to the quality of the wood, but not the age of the wood.” It’s a fine but crucial distinction.
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There are obvious differences between lightweight ‘swamp’ ash and heavy northern ‘baseball bat’ ash, but nobody talks about the specific Louisiana bayou from which Fender’s timber suppliers sourced their lumber back in the 1950s. Even less attention is given to alder and when tonewoods are discussed in relation to Fenders, weight is considered to be more important than age.
Lightweight ash and alder body blanks are still widely available, so vintage Fender enthusiasts tend to focus their attention on pickups and, to a lesser extent, hardware. This strikes me as sensible, so long as opinions remain unswayed by marketing blurbs that reference Texas.
While the informed vintage Gretsch enthusiast may draw some distinction between three- and five-ply bodies, and various bracing methods, nobody has ever claimed there’s such a thing as ‘tone ply’. Fortunately, vintage Gretsch pickups remain relatively affordable and some of the Custom Shop s being produced under Stephen Stern’s guidance are right up there with – some might even say superior to – anything Gretsch has ever produced.
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In the electric world, the vintage wood cult centres primarily on Gibson more than any other manufacturer. In fact, it’s almost exclusive to solidbodies of the 1950s rather than semis or 1960s solidbodies. Some of the
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