Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Now I have four electric guitars, and I get to put them into a rotation. I played the GG5 Cus hollowbody a few weeks, then rotated in the Agile PS-900. Both of these were from Rondo music. I tend to get fascinated with one or the other to the exclusion of the others, with the result that when I play the others again it is almost like having a new guitar. This week I pulled out the Strat and rediscovered it again. It looks like this:

I think this has to be one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I was reminded of how much changing which guitar you have in your hand will change how you play. I was drawn to more bluesy style stuff, but sadly I have little mastery of blues licks. Or rock licks. I’m just a hack. I need to expand my vocabulary if I’m ever to be worthy of this awesome guitar. It sounded great, even played through digital effects (Jonathan will eventually convince me to go all-analog).

The single-coils are the Fender custom staggered tex-mex pickups. I was amazed how bright and hollow the neck pickup is, and how sweet and vaguely smoky the neck pickup is alone. In combination, it’s a sweet, fat sound. The diamondback humbucker in the bridge position doesn’t disappoint either. My buddy Jeff bought the noiseless one, but the noiseless pickups just don’t carry the strat sound. This one clearly does. It’s all the strat you could want. If I were going through a tube screamer and straight to my tube amp it might squirt out some better tone, but the only real issue I have with sound right now is the guitar player.

The C-shaped, satin-finished neck is very comfortable to me. I am not screaming up and down the fretboard, pulling out monster tapping licks and the like, but I like not having my thumb stick to the back of the neck.

The switching is handy enough. It never gets in my way and is easy to reach. This included the S1 switch in the crown of the volume pot.

There are only three negatives for me:

• I seldom use the tremolo arm, because this guitar does come out of tune if you lay on the whammy.
• I want to change out the tuners. Either they’re desperately in need of adjustment or they’re desperately in need of replacement. I’m thinking some Gotoh, Sperzel, or Schaller locking tuners would be a really good upgrade. I’ll adjust the tuners I have for now and hope for the best.
• I wish it came with a nice roller nut or a nice brass one. This is pretty generic, but functional. I think it’s pinching my strings a bit, so I need to file/paper the guide slots a bit. I don’t know that it would help to use graphite there. I tried once and it didn’t seem to make any difference.

As a matter of preference, I wish it came in the nice transparent butterscotch blonde you can see on vintage Telecaster guitars.

I would have liked that better than the sienna sunburst (too red but at least it shows wood grain). The butterscotch finish that’s available on the HSS is non-tranparent. It looks like a pumpkin. I had that first, but I hated it and traded up.

If you’re looking to buy a strat in the $900-1200 neighborhood (non-sunburst is cheaper), you could hardly do better and could certainly do worse.

If you are a Fender representative: Please consider putting out a model with the vintage butterscotch blonde transparent finish and some of your upscale Fender/Schaller tuner machine heads. This is a very nice strat, and you all do great work. PS send me a TC90.