JJ Guitars Special Blue

Made in 2004 and bought same year. Hand-made one piece double cutaway brazilian mahogany body and one piece b/m neck with a long-neck tenon. Nickel-plated one piece bridge milled from a single block of aluminium (like the US PRS guitars)and nickel-plated brass posts. Lovely blue finish with a natural edge binding. P90 at the neck, h/b at the bridge controlled by one volume and one pull-to-tap tone. Non-locking sperzel tuners and graphtec nut. Flat top and smallish body - feels like a les paul junior. Weighs a good deal lighter than a les paul standard and balances perfectly on the strap. Neck is a reasonably large handful. The indian rosewood fret board - now around fifty years old and made from old Burns blanks, is really smooth, rich and dark. Great looking plank of wood, beautifully basic and understated.

The stock pickups are good. It's easy to get a good range of tones out of them; the p90/humbucker mixes are particularly interesting. Modern jazz to heavy metal sounds are easy to get. However, this guitar really needs to be played loud and proud to get the best out of it, whetehr clean or dirty. It's character is somewhat curtailed and meek at bedroom levels; i think because the pickups appear to be wound on the hot side of vintage and require some volume for both clean and dirty playing to hear their characters; through a good valve amp of course! (It rocks through a JC120 though.)

Put this through any distortion and this particular one obliges me with an extra sub octave - even through a mere DS1. An old les paul junior that once passed briefly through my hands for a recording springs to mind yet again. The untapped p/u mix has a really good rich funk tone unusual for an all-mahogany build. The p90 sounds really fluid for leads. Harmonics are easy to get off the fretboard with enough volume; another surprise considering the full feeling neck. It does a convincing country twang; I was pickin' the roadhouse at some US venues with it last year, and the grinnin' came easy...

Overall impression on tone is a modern take on a vintage classic while having a character of its own. The body of this guitar when played at full steam vibrates like a rattlesnake . Even single lead lines can be felt on the underside of the ribcage. Sustain is wonderful but not endless.

I thought several times of changing the pickups but over the years of ownership have decided the money spent won't really be worth the percieved enhancement in tone. I have another mod in mind for this.

The finish and hardware range from the highest quality to the rather so-so, particularly the sharp-feeling and rather cheap-looking tone and volume controls and the pots themselves should be better. In fact I changed the volume pot for a CTS almost immediately. Pickups are very well balanced. All the metal hardware is high quality and nickel plated. The inscribed oval jack plate has the knack of unscrewing itself on occassion. I think the cavity control and truss rod covers are a bit cheap-looking, but they're nicely fitted into the guitar.

The neck is quite bendy considering its size, though not quite as bendy as an SG. It's something to watch out for however, if you're using it regularly for recording as I do. The neck is a bit too full for me but it's nowhere near as massive as some LP jrs or old teles.

It's obvious that a lot of care has gone into the build.

Another reviewer has described himself capable of using his JJ Retro to twat Tyson with. I believe he's correct; the man wouldn't stand a chance. The build quality is really good and feels like a tough little guitar. I think it's been really well put together; a guitar that vibrates under your arm with a single note and gets the sub-octave is to me evidence of a tremendous quality of build with good tonewoods. The fret ends, although perfectly smooth, looked a little rough-and-ready. The finish is a tough-looking polyester; to be honest, I think a thinner cellulose finish would have been better suited considering the tone wood used, but this would have pumped up the price considerably, I guess.

I've not had to deal with them, but they appear to care a lot about their products, so fair play to them. The seem to put in a lot of research time before releasing new models. Apparently they're re-issuing the blue (and the gold) special model (discontinued a few years ago)in '09 due to on-going demand! I'm not suprised.

This guitar gets a high rating partly because of the number of times I've been tempted to sell/exchange it for something else in the past but just kept coming back to it. I'm taking it to my local luthier (Chris Eccelshall) to reshape the neck and replace the tone control with a parametric eq being designed by John East in the UK. This involves further routing of the body as there's precious little space in it for modifications.

There's something about the tone, playability and character of this guitar that keeps bringing me back to it. With the mods mentioned above, I'll keep it for life.

I paid ??949 for it more than five years ago, brand new at the time. If you can tell me where you can get a brand new, hand-made (no CNC routers used)guitar with a one-piece brazilian body and neck and custom-made pickups for anything like that price, then I want to know...

It's a great and very underated guitar; they sell very cheaply second-hand on ebay when they come up. But seriously, the build quality of these things is really much better than/equivalent to the big three considering the money that changes hands for them. Only Rickenbacker's build quality is more consistently better than the 3.

If they relaunch this guitar with UK-made pickups, better tone/volume pots, thinner finish and a slimmer neck, (oh and include a case please!) JJ have a real winner on their hands. This already wins on tone and character. A STONKING GUITAR!