Indholdsfortegnelse for Fender: Stratocaster Handbook i Fender: Stratocaster Handbook

The Fender Stratocaster Handbook is a celebration of the contribution that Fender’s electric guitar has made to musicians and musical culture in the 70-plus years since the company’s first Strat left the factory in 1954. Since then, this once-tiny musical instrument company in California has developed into an international corporation and a household name, as has its most famous creation – the timeless, somehow always relevant Stratocaster. Find out how Fender’s Stratocaster was developed, and get up close and personal with some of the rarest and most valuable Strats ever played and displayed. Study the techniques of the players who made the Stratocaster famous, from Buddy Holly and Hank Marvin to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. We also speak to some famous players indelibly linked with their iconic Strats, name…

Ever since its launch in 1954, the Fender Stratocaster has been, at once, the most recognisable electric in the world and the most mercurial. While Telecasters tend to deliver a somewhat familiar ride every time you pick one up, when you try a Strat for the first time it’s harder to predict whether it will be light, pristine and bright – or dark, warm and gutsy. That’s partly because, beneath the skin, the model has changed like a chameleon through the different phases in its evolution. With the landmark of model’s eighth decade in production now reached, we began thinking about whether it’s possible to crown a particular point in the Strat’s storied life where it had reached perfection, the peak of its evolution as a design. A point before…

At David Gilmour’s Medina Studio near Brighton, Phil Taylor, his guitar tech, takes us through his studio setup. Medina is smaller than you may expect for a musician of Gilmour’s legendary status, but size isn’t everything: Medina is bespoke to Gilmour’s needs. We start our studio tour with what is unarguably David Gilmour’s most celebrated guitar – which is something of a ‘mongrel’. He bought the Fender from Manny’s Music store in New York in May 1970 during Pink Floyd’s USA tour. Gilmour had, just weeks earlier, bought his first black Fender Strat at Manny’s, but it was soon stolen, along with much of Floyd’s rig. Floyd cancelled their remaining US dates, but David again visited Manny’s and bought this before returning to the UK. The Black Strat was first…

We read that $2 billion-worth of music has flowed through the Hitmaker.… “Yeah, and that was an estimate some time ago, so you add on a couple of years. You gotta realise how much music I play. When you think about it, people know the Chic hits and they know Get Lucky, but they don’t realise about the film scores, the video games, all that other stuff. You add all that together, it becomes a pretty sizeable number rather quickly. “So that $2 billion number… I think I heard that three years ago. Maybe even longer. I’ve been regurgitating that fact for a long time now!” What would you say makes the Hitmaker such a special Strat? “It’s lighter than any other Strat. Fender bought a shipment of alder around…

Imagine you are musician walking past a shop window in 1954. You stroll past, take a glance… and then stop dead in your tracks. Behind the glass is what seems to be a rocket ship, its sunburst finish glowing like polished amber. The guitars around it seem bulky and cumbersome by comparison – even that upstart solidbody, the Telecaster, you first clapped eyes on a few years before, now seems like a tractor parked beside a Cadillac… In 1954 there was no guitar like the Strat. More remarkable still, in the seven decades since, no other new guitar has had such a transformative effect on the guitar scene. Today, a Strat looks as familiar as a tree or a drinking glass. But 70 years ago, it had no real precedent.…

Few Strat players are as iconic as Hank Marvin – it’s hard to picture him without also seeing in your mind’s eye a Fiesta Red Strat with a maple fingerboard and gold-plated fittings, the guitar with which he made his name in The Shadows. It’s a guitar that seemed electrifyingly modern in drab, post-war Britain, and in fact, it was the first example of Leo Fender’s contoured masterpiece to enter the country. It’s testament to the Strat’s adaptability that Hank’s still relying on the design decades later – and over the years, several other Strats have passed through the hands of this hugely influential player. We chatted with Hank about the ‘significant other’ Strats he’s used on landmark recordings, plus detailed insights into the Strat setup and component mods that…

When Leo Fender and his colleagues launched the first Fender solid-body electric guitar in 1950, almost everyone who saw it thought he’d gone mad. Fender’s early amplifiers were good, but a solidbody guitar? Every player knew that guitars were hollow. They had air inside. That was obvious: they were light, and there were holes on the top to let the lovely sound out. Every maker knew that it took craftmanship, skill and attention in order to build a guitar: bending the wooden sides, carving or pressing the top and back, carefully constructing a special box that transformed what guitarists played into beautiful sound. Since the 1930s, Rickenbacker, National, Gibson, Epiphone and others had made some electric guitars. They were archtop hollowbody guitars with built-in pickups and controls, but (with honourable…

When I told a guitar-playing friend that I was going to be writing an article on this guitar, he pointed out, “Hendrix sounded great on any guitar.” Well, of course! But lest we forget, the guitars our heroes were playing in the 50s and 60s were the best of the best, particularly Jimi, who was rocking late-60s, big-headstock Strats. Still, with the right tools and guidance, we can get quite a bit extra out of this off-the-shelf Strat. Our Mexican-made model features a right-handed body and an upside-down left-handed neck. Tonally, it’s a little thin in timbre and not hugely resonant; the output is quite low and could be more assertive. Of course, much of this is down to the neck and body wood, but the hardware and, more importantly,…

Which is the greatest era of Strat in your personal opinion? Paul Waller: “For me, it’s early 60s. I think that’s when the Strat really started to come into its own. Putting the rosewood on there, slimming out the neck, and the pickups started getting dialled in to really make what pure Strat sounds are for me.” Austin MacNutt: “I like the late-50s Strats – just the classic look. They all look great, but I feel like they really got it right, right out of the gate.” What do you regard as an ideal weight for a Strat? Paul: “I personally like just under 8lb – maybe 7 ¾lb.” Austin: “Yeah, that’s a good range. I’m not terribly picky about it, honestly. I’ve got Strats all over the weight spectrum…

You will likely have read many times in Guitarist’s pages that no two Strats are the same. And if you own more than one of these game-changing guitars you’ll appreciate the truth in that statement. Ash body, alder body, rosewood or maple fingerboard, hardtail, traditional or floating vibrato; these apparently minor changes all impact the tone, albeit in subtle ways. Pickup height, string action, neck carve, and roller or conventional nut also play their part in how the guitar feels and sounds to each of us. Back in the day, pretty much every operation to build a Fender guitar was carried out by workers who hand-sanded, hand-wound and hand-finished every aspect. And while much of this still happens in today’s Corona California facility, modern production techniques mean tolerances are much…

We have already taken a brief look at Jimi Hendrix’s playing approach (see page 94), but now we go deep into his style and show you some of the key elements of his playing that you can use to improve your own technique, as generations of guitarists have done from every corner of the electric guitar’s broad church. So deep is Hendrix’s influence on modern guitar playing, you may already use some of these techniques without even knowing, but such is Jimi’s genius, there’s probably a few you don’t, too – his style really does contain something for everyone. We’re kicking off with a look at Jimi’s rhythm playing and his ‘thumb over the neck’ fretting technique, which forms the basis for most of his technique. Turn the page to…

The year was 1966. The year that saw Bob Dylan hold fast to his electric guitar with Blonde On Blonde; the year that saw FIFA World Cup madness drench England, and the year that celebrated the conviction of Moors Murderers Myra Hyndley and Ian Brady. London was well and truly swinging, with mini skirts, Mary Quant and Manfred Mann high on everyone’s agendas. But from within the haze and smog of the big city grew an army of six-string fanatics, each preaching the word of ‘god’ and defacing public property with a single, immortal line: ‘Clapton is God.’ No exclamation marks were needed to punctuate the fervour of this statement. Nothing else needed to be said. Eric Clapton – barely entered into adulthood at 21 – had achieved deity status…

Take a really close look at a variety of Stratocasters built over the six decades that they’ve been manufactured and you start to realise that the Strat’s iconic body shape, as well as hardware and other styling details, has drifted quite a bit from its original form over time. Indeed, it’s only when you get up close to an original ’54 Strat that you realise how much those apparently changeless contours have changed between the 50s and the present day. When Rod Brakes, then-proprietor of Vintage ‘n’ Rare Guitars in Bath, showed us a very clean ’54 Strat in near-complete original condition, we took it as a cue to chart some of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which this most familiar of all electric guitars has evolved since the…

Rory Gallagher’s battered ’61 Strat is the stuff of legend. Bought on tick in 1963 from Crowley’s Music Shop in Cork, only the wear evidenced on SRV’s Strat compares. “There were people who thought that Rory was chiselling it away each night, but it wasn’t the case,” recalls his brother Dónal. “Rory’s sweat was so acidic that it was like paint stripper. After a three-hour set, it was always covered with sweat and you could just see the paint starting to bubble up. Rory was very concerned about it, it felt like premature balding!” The sweat was such a problem that in the late 70s, Rory started getting tuning problems with the neck. He took it to Fender, who discovered that a mix of the huge amount of moisture in…

This circa-1965 Stratocaster belonged to Stevie Ray Vaughan, and was nicknamed ‘Lenny’ by him in honour of his wife, Lenora. He turned to it when performing live to play the song Lenny, a mesmerising, dream-like, jazz-inflected instrumental with a dynamic clean tone quite in contrast to the full-throttle Texas blues that was his stock-in-trade. The guitarist would often close the set by performing the song sitting on the stage edge, smoking a cigarette contemplatively and conjuring magical, fluid runs and extended chords from his fretboard that were suspended somewhere between Hendrix’s Little Wing and the flash of Kenny Burrell, two of Stevie Ray’s major inspirations. A circa 1965-model Strat found in a pawn shop in the early 1980s, ‘Lenny’ was a heavily modded creation. Its sunburst finish had been removed…

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HANK MARVIN What Strat moment on a recording inspires you most? “Going back to my school years, hearing the intro and solo of The Crickets’ That’ll Be The Day on a jukebox was a revelation, and motivated me to try to copy this ‘new to us’ American style of rock ’n’ roll guitar. As regards my own playing, I thought The Theme From The Deer Hunter (Cavatina) was special as it’s a beautiful composition written by Stanley Myers, and also my performance was recorded in one take, except for one note where there was an odd distortion. I dropped in and replaced the note. “A couple of other recordings that I like for different reasons are Hot Rox, which I wrote with my son Ben; it was fun for me…

BUDDY HOLLY The leader of the Strat pack; the hero of our heroes Buddy Holly was taken far too soon, at the age of just 22 in an air crash on 3 February 1959, immortalised by Don Henley as “the day the music died” in his 1971 song American Pie. In that time, Buddy had created a rock ’n’ roll blueprint of two guitars, bass and drums that would inspire McCartney, Lennon, Dylan, The Stones and many more. He would do more to popularise the Stratocaster in the decade of its inception than any other artist. An accomplished guitarist, aside from his songwriting genius, Buddy brought a hybrid of rhythm and lead to fledgling rock ’n’ roll at a time when single-note guitar breaks had been popularised by the likes…

When Guitarist reported on the auction of the late, great Gary Moore’s guitar collection, one comment that came back from readers was: ‘Nice, but where’s the Red Strat?’ Like Clapton’s lost ‘Beano’ ’Burst or Larry Carlton’s ’68 ES-335, some instruments are indelibly associated with a player. Even though Gary Moore used a very wide variety of guitars during the fiery course of his career, it is to the Fiesta Red ’61 Stratocaster that many of his fans return, again and again, as an icon of his artistry. So when we learned that Fender Custom Shop Master Builder John Cruz [who has since left Fender] had been given the green light to build an exacting replica of Gary’s Red Strat – also known as the Pink Strat, for reasons that shall…

All Strats are the same, right? If only. It’s a testament to the design of this all-time classic that models of a similar price level can sound, play and feel, remarkably different. You find a good one then, dammit, you play another that trumps it. Throw in the diverse range of styles that the Strat has excelled in, in the hands of a diverse number of players, and you have a seemingly simple instrument that can be annoyingly slippery to define. So with just 27 of these £8k Gary Moore tributes coming to Europe, how does it fit into this world? This writer was dispatched to Fender’s Artist centre at John Henry’s rehearsal complex, with no knowledge of Gary’s original Strat, to take a look. As we examine the guitar…