Fender has unveiled a new limited edition signature bass guitar for Mike Kerr of Royal Blood, and it is a thing of beauty, a short-scale Jaguar, finished in Tiger’s Blood Orange with gold hardware, a black pickguard, a slab rosewood ‘board with white pearloid block inlays.
The limited edition four-string arrives in a signature padded gigbag with animal print lining. You’ll find Kerr’s signature on a decal on the back of the headstock. There’s a tiger etched onto the neck plate. But really anyone who is looking for top-quality runaround for low-end adventures would do well to check this out.
With a custom humbucker at the bridge, a Wide Range humbucker at the middle position, the Mike Kerr Jaguar is voiced for rock players. It has a solid alder body, a bolt-on maple neck in a Modern C shape as per the Player Series Jags. The rosewood ‘board is carved into a 9.5” radius, seating 20 medium jumbo frets.
There is a synthetic bone nut, measuring 38.1mm across, a four-saddle vintage-style HiMass bridge, and vintage-style open-gear tuners.
The pickups are controlled by a master volume and tone pots, and there’s a three-position pickup selector allowing you to select either pickup or both.
“The humbuckers for me are really important,” says Kerr. “The custom pickup, the smaller one at the back, that is for me is kind of the wild card. I use it a lot in the studio, particularly if you want to double-track bass and have a kind of spaghetti western kind of thing, where you are having a twang and then something subby without having to grow and grab another guitar. They are both there.”
The bass’s finish was apparently inspired by worn out red on film stock. Kerr suggests that his email to the Fender R&D department might have been low on detail but they have somehow made sense of it and come up with another classic solid-colour finish, as though they took Capri Orange, the special summer colour for the Player series from a few years ago, made it darker, with bit more red in it, and then applied the high-gloss urethane after the fact to make the colour really pop.
Fender’s has applied high-gloss urethane to the natural headstock facing, with satin urethane on the neck to make it extra tactile.
Kerr’s Jaguar is made in Mexico, limited to an unspecified number of units, and it is available now, priced £1,549 / $1,599. See Fender for more details.
