Strats - I love and hate 'em

Geezerjohn said:
Ya gotta kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. My "desert island" guitars are my Suhr Classic (with roasted maple neck) and my Suhr Modern with 2x JST humbuckers. The Classic is vintage sunburst and the Modern is a charcoal black. Both play and sound phenomenal. The Suhrs are two of the finest guitars I ever owned. I imagine that Rasmus is an awesome guitar.
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my Suhr strats...,.
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Anytime I play my Les Paul, I think: what a great tone and feel.
Anytime I play my Haar Strat, I think: what a great tone and feel.
Anytime I play my Haar Tele, I think: what a great tone and feel.
I'm a lucky guy.
 
Interesting timing for this thread...

Over the past 30 years I have owned a couple of strats and played many..... never been overly enamoured by them.

Then yesterday, this guy I am recording walks in with a 10 year old 'Made in Mexico' strat....

Holy sh*t just holding it in my hands I realised this was a special instrument - just felt so right.

Then I played it.... wow.... wonderful chime, silky fretboard - everything about it is perfect, fantastic intonation, so playable; I was stunned.

I offered to buy it on the spot - but unfortunately it is not for sale - damn!!

I guess a 2007 MIM strat is not usually regarded as the holy grail... must have been a fluke off the production line!
 
yek said:
Anytime I play my Les Paul, I think: what a great tone and feel.
Anytime I play my Haar Strat, I think: what a great tone and feel.
Anytime I play my Haar Tele, I think: what a great tone and feel.
I'm a lucky guy.
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Now all you got to do is learn to play the right notes :p

I think my problem is that I have pretty much exclusively played one particular guitar for over 20 years ..... I think a big part in buying all the others was to try and tempt myself off it (well it's as good an excuse as anything). The only other guitar that has come closest to doing that is my EBMM Luke ...... those things have addictive necks
 
maxdown said:
I avoided Strats for years ..... a LP was my first decent guitar back in my youth and any time I picked up a Strat it just felt too weird in comparison (plus too expensive for me back then too which was as big a factor).

I moved on to using Charvels and then my beloved Patrick Eggle which I bonded with from the first 5 minutes of picking it off the wall at the Eggle factory showroom. It became my workhorse for many years (still is). I finally bought a used USA Strat Deluxe a few years back to add to my stable of various things I'd picked up.

There's no denying a Strat is a versatile and good sounding guitar ..... but man there are some annoying things that makes my life difficult. Well more my right hand than anything else ........ if I'm not clattering the vol knob I'm clattering the selector switch and if I'm not clattering either of those I'm clattering my pick off the middle pickup.

It's the only guitar I own that forces me to be conscious of my right hand .... it makes nice sounds and I adapt to it ....... but it's always a fight!

Is it just me?
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Spot on!
 
Once you get used to where everything is on a Strat, you'll realize that the controls are ideally placed. You can wrap your pinky around the volume knob while still addressing the strings—no matter what pickup you're using. All the controls are a short elbow swing away from the action, and they line up with the arc of your forearm. Learn to manipulate them with the fingers that aren't holding the pick, and you can switch pickups and strum, all in the same stroke. No reaching across the guitar to the upper bout.

And comfort? A Strat tucks into your body and cradles your forearm like no LP ever could.

I still use my 'bucker-equipped guitars for many things, but there's something very special about a good Strat or copy thereof.
 
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I both love and hate my American Strat. Tuning issues.
It lives in its case and I curse at it occasionally.
Maybe one day I will buy a Super-Vee/BladeRunner tremolo for it.

Whomp whomp whommmmmmmmp....
 
maxdown said:
Now all you got to do is learn to play the right notes :p

I think my problem is that I have pretty much exclusively played one particular guitar for over 20 years ..... I think a big part in buying all the others was to try and tempt myself off it (well it's as good an excuse as anything). The only other guitar that has come closest to doing that is my EBMM Luke ...... those things have addictive necks
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Agreed on the Luke. I'm loving my Luke 3 and very impressed with the passive dimarzios
 
I played only humbuckers for years, first an SG than a LP. About 10 years ago I got a PRS McCarty. The coil tap lets me get all the Strat I want. To me the most beautiful sound in a Strat is the neck pickup and I can get that and easily switch back to the humbucking crunch that I love. Plus the PRS is so much lighter than a LP and has the double cutaway like a Strat. For me it's the best of both worlds.
 
zack said:
...I guess a 2007 MIM strat is not usually regarded as the holy grail... must have been a fluke off the production line!
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Maybe a bit of a fluke, but I've got a couple of MIM Strats that have the chimey harmonic magic. They just want to sing. (And more so after I swapped out the factory pups.)
 
My first real guitar was a '76 Strat (which I still have) and I learned to play on it, so a Strat fits me like a glove. I played it for decades and the controls/feel are second nature to me; it's the layout I'm most comfortable with. I had a Les Paul for several years and found it a bit more cumbersome in adjusting the volume/tone/pickup selector, but I had no problem with it.

With the right pre-EQ I was always able to fatten up a single coil Strat to sound very humbucker-like so I never really missed a humbucker type guitar.

Although I'm using and HSS super-Strat now (Suhr S4) a single coil Strat is truly a chameleon; it covers so much varied ground and I'm looking to get a nice Suhr SSS at some point.
 
Rex said:
What did you swap in?
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One has a Seymour Duncan SSL-5 bridge pickup, a Fender Custom Shop '69 Strat middle pickup, and a Fender Custom Shop Fat '50s Strat neck pickup (an alleged Gilmour set) and the other has Fender Custom Shop Texas Specials in all three slots. Pretty run of the mill stuff, but hotter than the factory pups. Both guitars are really resonant unplugged. (I like to try out electrics unplugged in the acoustic guitar room at the local music stores before I even plug them into an amp.)

The "Gilmour guitar" was a pretty dinged-up black MIM that the local Guitar Center was selling for $189. It has a nice neck and decent tuners. I blocked the bridge (never have bonded with the MIM tremolo systems) and touched up the dings with black nail polish. Looks great from about 5 feet away, lol.
 
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I'm taking the middle road. My thing is super strats with the shorter Gibson scale, 24.75", humbucker equipped and controls out of the way. Mahogany body with maple set neck. 24 frets with great access all over the neck. Hardtail...
For me is the perfect combination. Strat playability + LP tone.
Not easy to find guitars like this so I got it custom made:
IMG_2968.jpg
 
ztevie said:
I'm taking the middle road. My thing is super strats with the shorter Gibson scale, 24.75", humbucker equipped and controls out of the way. Mahogany body with maple set neck. 24 frets with great access all over the neck. Hardtail...
For me is the perfect combination. Strat playability + LP tone.
Not easy to find guitars like this so I got it custom made:
View attachment 39412
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Beautiful guitar!
 
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