JET JS450 Review: A Budget Guitar With Seriously Premium Specs

The JET JS450 is a very affordable guitar with a spec sheet that really doesn’t look like it belongs on a very affordable guitar. You get a roasted Canadian maple neck, locking tuners, a flame maple veneer, two humbuckers and, most surprisingly, a genuine two-point Wilkinson tremolo. On paper alone, it’s already punching well above its weight.

The first thing that really got me, though, was the neck. It’s a modern C profile with a satin finish, and the roasted Canadian maple has just a hint of flame running through it. Nothing too dramatic, but enough to make it look considerably more interesting than the usual plain maple neck you might expect at this end of the market.

There are 22 medium-jumbo frets and a 9.5-inch radius, which puts the JS450 in a bit of a Goldilocks zone. It’s not super flat, but it’s not vintage-round either. There’s enough curvature to feel comfortable, while still letting you run a nice low action and get underneath the strings for big bends without everything fretting out. The frets themselves are modern in size without being comically tall, and the whole thing feels very natural under the hand.

Up at the California Custom-style headstock, we have six-in-line JET-branded locking tuners. They use the familiar thumb-screw design and, more importantly, they actually work. Tuning stability is excellent, which matters quite a lot when the other end of the guitar is fitted with a non-locking tremolo that you’re actually going to want to use.

And this is where things get a little silly.

The JS450 comes with a genuine two-point Wilkinson tremolo with a pop-in arm, and it is superb. It’s smooth, responsive and feels like a properly good trem rather than something fitted purely so the spec sheet can say “tremolo bridge”. Wilkinson makes some of the best examples of this style of bridge, and seeing one on a guitar this inexpensive is genuinely baffling. Depending on where and when you’re buying, the trem itself could cost somewhere around half the price of the entire guitar if you bought it separately. That’s nuts.

The body is poplar, which is one of those words guaranteed to summon an internet argument about tonewood within about twelve seconds. Personally, I don’t subscribe to either extreme of the debate, but what actually matters here is that this guitar sounds great. It also has a nice bit of heft to it without being excessively heavy.

The blue-black burst is particularly handsome, sitting over flame maple that’s described as a veneer, with single-ply cream binding running around the front. Around the back, the darker finish lets just a little of the reddish colour of the wood show through. It’s a small detail, but the whole thing comes together very nicely and makes the JS450 look considerably classier than you might expect.

Electronics are refreshingly straightforward. We have two humbuckers, a three-way selector, master volume and master tone controls, giving you bridge, both pickups and neck.

Both pickups measure somewhere around the 7–7.5k mark, so these are definitely at the lower-output end of the humbucker world. If you’re looking for enormous, fire-breathing modern metal tones, these probably aren’t going to be your first choice. For almost everything else, though, they’re surprisingly versatile.

Through clean tones, a JCM800-style sound and a high-gain lead setup, all three positions come across as smooth, balanced and convincing. The lower output gives them a certain clarity, and there’s nothing about the core humbucker tones that feels obviously lacking. If I were buying this specifically for metal, I’d probably throw something hotter in there eventually, but otherwise I’d be perfectly happy leaving them alone.

The only real head-scratcher is the lack of coil splitting. With two humbuckers and a blade-style selector already on the guitar, it feels like an obvious opportunity to sneak in a couple more sounds. Still, the three tones you actually get are good enough that it’s difficult to get too upset about it.

Ultimately, the thing that makes the JS450 so impressive is that none of the big-ticket specs feel like gimmicks. The locking tuners keep it in tune, the Wilkinson trem is genuinely excellent, the neck feels great and the pickups cover a much wider range than their modest output might suggest.

Is it perfect? No. Metal players may want hotter pickups, and I’d have liked coil splits. But those are pretty minor complaints when the rest of the guitar gets so much right.

The JET JS450 is simply a ridiculous amount of guitar for the money. It looks great, plays really well and comes with hardware that makes you wonder how the maths works at all. I’m not sure how JET is building these for the price they are, but as a guitar player, I’m not going to complain about it.

Find out more about the JET JS450 at JETGuitars.com