Chris Shiflett has revealed he's been working with Fender on another signature Telecaster.
It’s been quite a while since the arrival of his first signature guitar, and the Foo Fighters guitarist has teased that his new Charcoal Frost prototype “plays nice and sounds fantastic”.
And, since it has already been road-tested in Washington, D.C., it’s possible that a full-scale production isn’t too far away. When it eventually arrives, it will be interesting to see how much it differs from his 2012 build.
That model was based on Shiflett's favorite ’72 Tele Deluxe, and boasted Fender CS1 and CS2 humbucker pickups and a low-action rosewood fretboard. A Masterbuilt variant with P-90s was also produced, but it came at an elevated cost – which is something Shiflett’s been keen to address this time around.
Shiflett let news of the work-in-progress slip during a conversation with MusicRadar, in which he confirmed this build will indeed feature those P-90 pickups to match his Custom Shop Telecaster – but it won’t come at a bank-breaking price.
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“I don’t know how familiar you are with my signature model, but the original one is a production model that has humbuckers in it,” he explained. “It was geared towards rock and what I do in Foo Fighters. Then we did a super-duper fancy Master-Built version that had P-90s and it was really expensive.
“One was really affordable and one was really, really expensive. So we’ve got one that’s coming out kind of down the middle that’s an American-made production version of the one with P-90s.”
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After the initial tease, Shiflett was cautious not to reveal too much additional detail. However, in keeping with the guitar’s affordability focus, he did note that Fender’s pickup guru Tim Shaw has been looking at making cheaper versions of the noiseless P-90s found in his original build.
“The master-built version had noiseless Lindy Fralin P-90s in it,” says Shiflett. “The production model has sort of a Fender version of that, I believe Tim Shaw designed them. And it sounds really good. It’s very close to the Fralins.”
Revealing that he’s had “prototypes in different colors”, Shiflett recently put a Charcoal Frost-finished build through its paces in Washington, D.C.
“It was the first time I got to play one of the prototypes through my actual touring rig,” he adds. “[I got to] soundcheck with it, tweak it, and see what it does. It sounds fucking amazing. It sounds really good.”
Closely inspecting snaps from the show, it looks like the guitar itself continues the rosewood fretboard tradition. Noticeably, block inlays are the choice here, usurping the dot inlays of his previous signatures, with four control knobs also visible.
The news comes less than a week since the launch of Epiphone and Dave Grohl’s DG-335 – another Foo Fighters signature model that was perhaps the most requested artist guitar in Epiphone’s history.
The chat with MusicRadar also saw Shiflett wax lyrical about the Neural DSP Quad Cortex, which he’s been using for his solo work. Whilst the stadium-entertaining guitarist still prefers a real amp when gigging with the Foos, he listed the floor modeler as an essential piece of gear for music-making.
