Fender Japan Sparkle Telecaster with Blacktop Filter’Tron pickups

29 Nov 2023 by Jef |

4,5 / 5,0 | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Fender Japan Sparkle Telecaster · Source: Fender

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The latest Fender Japan Sparkle Telecaster comes in a cool shimmering sparkle finish and is available in Blue, Silver, Black, or Orange finishes.

Fender Japan Sparkle Telecaster

The new Fender Japan Sparkle Telecaster comes with an alder body finished in one of four sparkly gloss finishes, as mentioned above. This model has a comfortable modern C-shape maple neck with a satin finish and a 9.5”-radius rosewood fretboard fitted with a set of 22 narrow-tall frets, plus white dot inlays, and a bone nut.

Filter’Tron

What makes it stand out from the crowd, apart from the choice of Blue, Silver, Black, or Orange sparkly finishes, is the pair of Fender Blacktop Filter’Tron pickups.

These pickups should give this Telecaster a different twang from your average Tele and offer something a little different. The pickups are wired with a single tone and volume control, along with a three-way pickup selector switch, so it should feel familiar to use.

All the hardware is fairly standard and includes a six-saddle half-Tele bridge, plus a set of vintage-style locking tuners.

Japanese Exclusive

Overall, it is a great-looking guitar and I would happily own one in any of the four finishes on offer. Currently, it is an exclusive model for the Japanese market. Hopefully, we may see them available to buy in Europe and the USA sometime in the future. As that tends to be the release pattern for some of these Japanese Fender models in the last few years. Keep your eyes peeled at your local Fender dealer, as these Japanese models do crop up on occasion, and are well worth checking out.

Good Price

It’s a fairly reasonably priced model (roughly $1000 at the time of writing) and the build quality on Japanese Fender guitars traditionally tends to be very good, so they are a bit of a bargain really. I love the style of these and, on paper, they sound like a well-specified variation on the classic Telecaster.

MSRP – YEN 159,500 including Fender gig bag