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Fender Toronado

 

Review of the Fender Toronado Electric Guitar by The Man in the Jar

This is a cross-over Fender to Gibson style guitar with its own Go-Faster-Stripe.

Features of the Fender Toronado

Tuners - Sealed unbranded mini-tuners that work extremely well.

Headstock - Classic Stratocaster flamboyance, six-a-side configuration with two string bushes. There's no truss rod cover here to detract from the bright red, slightly sparkling finish that adds a big dollop of cool. 

Nut - Black set-in-slot type which is neatly cut.

Neck - The C-shaped maple neck is beautifully slim and smooth. If I'd been handed this guitar on a blind-folded test I would've bet my life that it was an Ibanez, based on the lovely feel of the neck. Although the neck is bolt-on, the heel is contoured to give more comfortable access to the higher frets than you'd expect from the standard Fender square heel.

Fretboard - Medium-dark rosewood with a nice tight grain. The traditional dot markers are rendered in a lovely rainbow abalone.

Frets - This is where the Gibson-Fender-Crossover begins in earnest. The big, fat frets have a nice high profile for easy bending.

Action - Great action straight from the box. It comes loaded with 009's and is a very slinky player.

Body - The slab body is made from mahogany and has a pleasant substantial feel on the strap. The only contouring is on the back at the top and even this is slightly shallower than you'd expect to find on a Strat. The overall body shape has echoes of Jazzmaster, attractive to look at and comfortable to wear.

Bridge - Standard Gibson style Tune-o-matic and stoptail in chrome. Each saddle is individually adjustable for intonation and string height is adjusted wholesale by a screw at each end of the bridge assembly.

Pickups - Two black Seymour Duncan open-coil humbuckers sit in black surrounds.

Controls - More Gibson-flavour here. Individual volume and tone controls for each pickup wear black top-hat knobs. The three way selector sits on the upper bout. 

Strap-buttons - Large and safe buttons live in the usual places.

Output Jack - On the bottom edge of the body it an oval plate.

Finish - The red finish has a very slight sparkle about it that really looks the business. The stripe is a decal applied prior to the lacquer finish, but you have to look really hard to spot that. Up close the underlying colour does show through slightly, adding a essence of pink on this particular model. 

 

Sound of the Fender Toronado

Through a clean amp each pickup staked a claim to its own individual territory. The bridge pickup delivering chunky rock tones, the neck pickup, on the other hand, bringing home a surprisingly jazzy depth. Flicking to two-up combines the best of both sounds and quickly became my favourite clean channel tone as it has great balance across the strings.

Overdriven, the bridge pickup emerged with the strongest rock voice, falling nicely into crunchy, chunky, power chord rhythms. Switching to two-up or neck alone on the overdrive channel took this little Fender into heavier, darker tones which are excellent voices in themselves but somehow don't seem to suit the cheerful clean livery of the Toronado - it's far from a typical look for a Heavy Metal Axe! 

 

Overall Impressions of the Fender Toronado 

Like its cousin, the Telecaster Custom, the double-humbucked Toronado offers tangible Fender class with a weightier voicing. Both are exceptionally well suited to the new wave of modern guitar-based music that skirts the edge of hard rock and has no pretension to venture into heavy metal. If you hunger after a Les Paul then this guitar will not fill your plate. But if you're a Fender fan in search of a touch more balls then the Toronado is the axe for you. It's visually very cool, it's as playable as a good Ibanez and it has pucker name-brand pickups. All of that makes it an excellent choice for bending the Fender rules. Get hold of your Fender Bender today. 

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