Matsumoku Frontman II

Price

£1,999

I'll assume you have read the Frontman I page and so shan't go into the background save to say I deprived a band leader of a neck pick-up and so I made amends and threw in a middle for good measure. A sunburst 1979 Aria Pro II Stagecaster was about the correct weight for this anticipated build - light to medium weight, and snappy. Off came the hardware and out came the electronics - hey, off came the paint. Naked as the day it was sawn into a plank, several coats of our favourite yellow applied topped off with a black headstock. A new Gotoh GE101TS tremolo in contrasting black finish is topped by rebuilt Gotoh SG381, also in black. Having been impressed with a similar build with 2 hot P-90s, we decided to add a middle to that pair, and angle the bridge unit slightly for more gnarly aggression. A pair of Full Monty P-90s installed at the neck and bridge, we tried a few for the middle and settled on a Gotoh SC-STD unit - slightly less powerful than its neighbours, and therefore getting more of the quackiness for the parallel positions.

A Master Volume and Master Tone always suffices on these guitars, so the lower tone control is a blender that fades the neck pick-up in with the bridge when the bridge pick-up is selected. Given the brief that this guitar will be the default for the neck pick-up requirements, the blender only functions on the bridge pick-up, enabling a varying degree of bass introduction to the bitey gritty bridge tone. It adds an element of airiness - some space between the top and bottom. Like a giant Tele Deluxe in the middle position. However the bridge tone is tailored, banging the pick-up selector to the neck gets you the undiluted unalloyed neck P-90. To use this guitar as a normal traditional Strat, there is a requirement to back the volume to 8.5 on the knob as wound all the way up, every tone in every position screams to get out. It isn't "angry", like Keiths Ibi#2, just energetic and keen. A very good quality PIO capacitor tames the aggression via the tone pot. This thing begs for an AC30 with a slightly past its best speaker. The P-90s will squeal at you at monster gain levels, but I think that's the whole point. You may move closer to the stack to make it more so. Our Frontman has more energy on stage than a man of his age has any right to have. Now he has a pair of guitars to match that.