Fender John 5 Ghost Telecaster Electric Guitar, Maple Fingerboard, Arctic White

The Fender John 5 Ghost Telecaster is the white one — an Artist Signature Tele in Arctic White with red binding around the body, red dots down the maple board, red humbucker bobbins and a red Fender script on the matching painted headcap. It is also about as pared-back as an electric gets: two DiMarzio D Activator humbuckers, one volume knob, a killswitch and a six-saddle hardtail bridge. Nothing on this guitar exists to be fiddled with mid-song.

Volume, killswitch, and not much else

Fender describes the layout as a single volume knob and a killswitch, and that is what you get your hands on: a red knob with numbers around the skirt and a red push button, side by side on their own strip clear of your picking hand, with a small red-tipped toggle up on the upper bout. Cut the signal on the beat and you get the stuttered, machine-gun rhythm that is John 5's calling card — and because it is a button rather than a lever, you can work it at speed without knocking it into the wrong position. There is no tone control to hunt for in the dark. Volume up, play.

DiMarzio D Activator humbuckers, front and back

A D Activator sits at the neck and another at the bridge, both passive, so there is no battery to charge, replace or forget at a gig. The bridge unit pushes a valve amp hard and keeps palm-muted chugging tight and separated rather than turning it into mush; the neck unit is the one you swap to for a lead line and it stays thick without going woolly. Both are direct-mounted with their red bobbins on show, which on an Arctic White body is at least half the point.

A hardtail that stays put

The Ghost runs a fixed bridge with six individual saddles and the strings anchored through the body — you can see the ferrules in a neat row on the back. A hardtail is the right answer for a guitar that lives on a killswitch: it keeps tuning through hard picking and aggressive bends, it hands more of the string's energy straight to the timber, and every string intonates on its own saddle. Restringing is a two-minute job with no springs, no claw and no floating bridge to rebalance.

Fast maple neck, 22 frets

The bolt-on neck is maple with a maple fingerboard and a modern “C” profile — the shape most players reach for without thinking about it, full enough to hold onto and shallow enough to move quickly. The 9.5-inch fingerboard radius is Fender's comfortable middle ground: flat enough that big bends do not choke out, rounded enough that first-position chords still sit properly under your hand. Twenty-two frets run to the body, with red dot markers that read instantly against the pale maple under stage lights. The back of the neck is left satin natural, so your hand slides instead of sticking.

Arctic White, trimmed in red

Red binding runs the whole way around the body edge and it is the detail that makes this guitar work — a single hard line of colour against flat white, picked up again by the inlays, the knob, the killswitch, the pickup bobbins and the logo. The headcap is painted to match the body, the hardware is chrome and the six-in-line tuners are Fender's own sealed machines. A John 5 signature neck plate holds it all together. Set up in-store by Guitar World Australia's techs before it ships to you, so it plays perfectly the moment it arrives.