About 6 months ago I was having a deeply philosophical discussion with my long-suffering bandmates MacDeth and McBOOOm about dream guitars. Not guitars you play in dreams, but guitars you would design if you had the chance. I decided I would make one with a Stratocaster body, but with an F-hole, which is something you don't see on Fender Strats. I'd have a neck like the one on my Telecaster, and I'd have two humbuckers. I would also prefer a hardtail bridge (ie. no tremelo arm), because I go out of tune enough as it is, and I don't have the patience to set up a Floyd Rose.
The people at Fender Japan must have heard me (and translated my speech into Japanese), because shortly afterwards they announced they'd be making this guitar, which has all the stuff I asked for! Another cool feature is that it has no tone control. The knobs you see are for volume and pickup blend. So essentially you get your tone control by mixing between the neck pickup and the bridge pickup.
As soon as I heard about the production of this beauty I went and ordered one at the local Rockshop. And voila, a couple of months later, here it is!
Over that waiting period I had plenty of time to wonder if the guitar would actually be any good when it arrived. Thank goodness, the first time I picked it up it just absolutely sang! It's a total joy to play, especially if you like a slim neck. I had thought it would be kinda chunky, but it's actually very slim.
The finish is as good as you would expect from a Japanese Fender - ie. marvellous. No sharp fret ends, the action is nice and low (the way I like it!), the frets are nicely polished, the pickups are correctly positioned (you know how some guitars look like they've been put together by a Dadaist construction team...), the paintwork is flawless, and so on.
The pickups have been well-chosen, and the sounds you can get are pretty varied. The neck pickup sounds great for high-gain solos, or just as nice doing clean chords. Fender's "Wide-Range" humbucker is juicy and bell-like, and surprisingly similar to the neck pickup on my Telecaster. Just with a bit more grunt. So it actually works nicely for clean (or slightly overdriven) country/rock too.
The "Enforcer" bridge pickup is obviously designed for rock riffery, judging by the name, but it can also be used for a different kind of clean tone, especially if you back off the volume a bit - it softens the attack somewhat. I'm mostly using it for high-gain rhythm chords (the string definition is good) and some good ol' rowdy palm muting.
Considering how different in character these two pickups are, it's pretty amazing how well they work together, and the output balance is spot on, so if you go from one to the other there's no massive change in volume.
The sustain is Tufnel-esque (meaning: really good), and the guitar is nice and light, so you can sling it round like an eejit onstage!
The F-hole doesn't make a hugely significant addition to the tone as far as I can tell, and peering inside you can see that it's not as hollowed-out as a Gibson 335, for example, but I would imagine that when you play through a loud amp it would really add some resonance. Plus it looks great. I was hoping they would offer a pie shape because I think a pie-hole would be cool. No luck so far.
I like my unusual guitars to look a little odd, so I went for the "Foam Green" version. You can get it in sunburst as well, but it looks a little too normal to me...
So if you want something a little unusual, that's great for rock, this beast could be the one for you, especially if you want a Gibson twin-humbucker kind of drive but prefer the feel of a Stratocaster.
