Fender Vintera II ’50s Jazzmaster, ’60s Stratocaster, and ’70s Jaguar Review

To players that cherished the Vintera guitars for their embrace of idiosyncratic and vintage-authentic elements, the expanded Vintera II series will probably seem like a Christmas stocking exploding from a Thanksgiving cornucopia into a Fourth of July fireworks finale. The burgeoning line now includes the Bass VI and competition stripe Mustang, a Telecaster Bass, and a Thinline Telecaster. It’s a beautiful batch of instruments that showcases some of the company’s most beloved and fascinating zigs and zags away from the norm, as well as several standard bearers.

While the three instruments that Fender sent our way don’t include the oddest of the series’ oddities, they still span the spectrum between the iconic, in the form of the ’60s Stratocaster, and more obscure instruments like the ’70s Jaguar with maple neck and black block fret markers. Two of our review guitars feature rosewood fretboards, which see a welcome return after the original Vintera series’ embrace of pau ferro fretboards. All three are built with alder bodies (only the Vintera II Telecaster Thinline is built with ash). Like just about any consumer goods, the new Vintera II guitars are affected by the realities of post-pandemic economics, and our review guitars range from $1,149 for the Stratocaster (which isn’t completely bonkers, given global inflation across the board) to $1,499 for the Jaguar, which is a bit more startling. Crossing the $1K threshold will be a tricky psychological hurdle for players accustomed to Mexico-made Fenders in the three-figure range. But as Paul Weller said, this is the modern world. And what’s reassuring is that the quality of these guitars is generally excellent, rivaling more expensive guitars in many respects.