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“Fender sent me a Jazzmaster and I didn’t play it. I thought it was awkward-looking”: Jim Root helped Fender create the most radical Jazzmaster ever – but he didn’t like the offset design at first.
The Slipknot guitarist famously reconfigured the popular indie stalwart for heavy metal purposes, but it took him quite some time before he fell in love with the Jazzmaster in the first place
In fact, it was only when he decided to play a Jazzmaster while standing up that he came to realize the full comfort and playability of the model.
“Fender sent me a Jazzmaster years before we talked about doing a signature model, and I really didn’t play it that often,” he says in the new issue of Total Guitar. “I thought it was kind of awkward-looking.
“It sounded really good, but I didn’t think about it much,” Root goes on. “And then we were doing pre-production on something and I put one of my straps on it so I could stand up and play, and I was like, ‘Holy shit! This guitar is just so well-balanced.’
“It felt so comfortable and easy to play because it was right in the pocket. So I hit Fender back up and was like, ‘I know you sent me this Jazzmaster a while ago, and I haven’t given you any input or talked about it, but I’m using it at rehearsal, and I’m loving it. It’s kind of awesome’. He said, ‘Cool. Do you want to do a signature model?’ And I was like, ‘Yes!’”
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