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glpease":54vucywb said:
The funny thing about the decals is that they've created, by their unwillingness to provide originals, an underground black market for the things. You can get pretty much any decal you want, but it won't come from Fender. Can we tell the difference? Maybe, side-by-side.
Fenders are all over the map for me. I played at least 30 Teles, from Chinese ones to Custom Shop models, before I bought the ash bodied MIM one that was the best of the bunch by a country mile. Changed the pickups, put a 4-position switch in (adds a serial position to the normal three) and love it. The best Strat I've played was an Yngwie model with scalloped fretboard that just blew my mind. So did the price. I didn't buy it...
But, Eric, yeah. The guy's very down-to-earth in many ways, but he's got a dog's ears, or so it would seem. And, those chords. Those impossibly beautiful chords. I can get them, but not quickly, and sometimes only with the help of my other hand...
Yup...it's now possible to get decals for just about any past Fender model. There are even folks who'll make custom decals from your own artwork if they don't happen to stock what you want. But their stock decals are so good that no one can tell with a casual glance.
I know what you mean about Fenders spanning a huge range of quality. And that's especially true of many "vintage" instruments, whose price tags often reflect their unobtainium and bragging rights content more than any intrinsic superiority in quality of materials or construction, or even in sound.
In my experience, the MIM Strats are probably one of the best values ever. I don't know whether it's still true, but at one time they used all U.S.-made components. They just didn't have the U.S. labor cost to jack up the price tag. So you're basically getting an American Strat that was assembled south of the border.
The best
playing Strat I've ever played is a '63 "L" Strat, so named because the serial numbers all started with the letter "L". I bought it for $200 from a guy in Springfield, IL in '78 when I was touring with Andy Gibb. It was missing the original knobs, so I had to replace those, and some jackball tried to refinish it, but botched the job. But it played like a dream from Day 1. I've played it so much over the years that I've had to have it refretted once, and it probably will need it again before long. Otherwise, it's all original.
The best
sounding Strat I've ever played is the Bari-Strat I built last year (depicted at right). The body is a MIM Deluxe Player's Strat with Fender<img class="emojione" alt="
" title=":tm:" title=":tm:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/emojione/assets/png/2122.png?v=2.2.7"/> Noiseless pickups. Fender doesn't make a baritone Strat, so I bought the body and had Warmoth build me a custom neck, which gives the guitar a 28.5" scale...with tuning a fourth lower than a standard 25.5" scale Strat.
Originally, the big attraction of the Deluxe Player's body was the push-button switch that adds the bridge p'up to switch positions 4 and 5, thereby providing all seven possible pickup combinations (singly or in parallel, not in series). But as it turns out, the pickups themselves are spectacular. They have none of the hum & buzz typical of standard Strat pickups, while still retaining the clarity, sparkle, and twang of single coil pickups...which is exactly what I wanted out of the guitar. It's the cleanest yet ballsiest twang I've ever heard, Strat-wise. I play it for hours...lost in the sound. In fact, it sounds so good that I'm tempted to glom onto a standard MIM Deluxe Player's Strat...as soon as I can figure out whether I want an all-maple neck or maple+rosewood fretboard. I'm leaning toward rosewood.
Anyhow Greg, you're the second amigo I know who has hung with Eric. Another guitar playing bro' (Sonny Paul, a former bandmate, whom I've known for over 40 years) knows Eric, and he has only good things to say about him. Very open, very approachable, and a total mutant, guitar-wise.
Carlos":54vucywb said:
I told my guitar teacher that guys like Eric, and Joe Satriani must be aliens. They must have extra knuckles and two wrists to be able to reach like they do. He claimed it was simply practice. That my hands would change and muscle memory would allow me to do what they do. I correctly pointed out that he plays all the time and he doesn't have hands like they do. He said, "Because Eric and Joe are actually aliens."
:lol: That's a hoot, Carlos. Aliens, mutants...whatever. They're not like us. Sometimes I think I can imagine what it's like to have that kind of focus and facility on the fretboard, where all you have to do is think it, and you can play it. But only because I've had it elsewhere. I had it when I was a drummer, but that was a long time ago.
I've never been as serious about the guitar, and serious is what it takes...which is probably what your guitar teacher was trying to say. But only the major mutant aliens have the drive to get that serious about ONE THING. It has to be your whole life. I have too many other things that are more important to me. But music is still a passion I can't live without, so I've found a balance that works. Science and audio for the left brain, and music for the right brain.
Pipes and weed fall somewhere in between...the great bridge. :mrgreen:
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