the fender stratocaster is perfect.

  • Thread starter Thread starter faderbug
  • Start date Start date

perfect strat?

  • i agree

    Votes: 119 41.5%

  • i disagree

    Votes: 168 58.5%
  • Total voters
    287
No, just a little farther up your ass than it already is.

When I say your anal canal is expansive, I ain't jokin'!
 
Most of my life I've played Les Pauls, Gibson hollowbodies, and Telecasters. Every Strat or Mustang/Jazzmaster I ever picked up had been set up to play lead guitar, which I basically don't do. I play heavy rhythm and some fingerstyle, and I use light jazz strings. Recently I picked up a Jimmy Vaughn signature Tex-Mex strat just as a studio guitar. After I opened the nut (just a little) to accept .11's with a wound G-string, and cranked the tremolo bridge down like a mother, it became one very cool guitar, probably my favorite all-around solid body.
I agree with the guy above, though who said the pickup selector switch below the strings is a pain. Trying to play, say, The Who, without hitting that sucker with your pick hand is a challenge. And as far as Jimi goes, he played a lot of guitars. The strat was his main stage guitar, I think because the poly/celluloid finish burns so well when covered with lighter fluid. While many technical criticisms could be leveled at Jimi's playing technique, he is one of several 20th century geniuses who thought outside the box, and expanded our knowledge of what a guitar can be used to do. There are many great guitarists, but very few whose technique and sound set the stage for generations of followers. RIP, Jimi.-Richie
 
The Strat is NOT perfect. But neither is a Les Paul, or a PRS, or a Tele, or a 335. But they all have their place.
Just like amps or microphones or colors, they're all different and they all have their place.
Anyone who thinks any guitar is perfect is either a noob or is very closed minded.
And a Les Paul is NOT a one trick pony. It's got 2 pickups giving 3 pickup combinations. And with the volume control, you can coax more sounds out of it. Try to sound like post IV era Jimmy Page or Slash or Angus with a Strat.
Even with humbuckers, a Strat does not sound like a Les Paul.
 
first thanks for the massive input!


i never ment that tha strat is the universal solution, just that the design in itself - for what it is and for what it s supposed to do - can not or very little be changed.

it is a perfect concept.

lance armstrong is the perfect atlete but he won t win the olympic ski jump. kwowaddamean?
 
Here's my Fender Stratocaster and one of my Gibson Les Pauls!!

Gibson-Boss014.jpg
 
ebonyyyyy and ivoryyyyy
live together in perfect harmonyyyy
side by side on my ... ;)
 
I think when you're younger, you want to follow your heros, you see the guitar they use and you think "cool, i want to be him". You buy it (even although it's a cheap copy) then depending on whether its a gibson or fender type guitar you follow on in that fashion. It's a sort of safe zone. I've been using fenders all my life, bought loads of effects and tried out different amps to try and get a "different" sound. I didn't even think about trying a gibson guitar, it just didn't enter my mind. Mabad :rolleyes:
 
orson198305 said:
I think when you're younger, you want to follow your heros, you see the guitar they use and you think "cool, i want to be him". You buy it (even although it's a cheap copy) then depending on whether its a gibson or fender type guitar you follow on in that fashion. It's a sort of safe zone. I've been using fenders all my life, bought loads of effects and tried out different amps to try and get a "different" sound. I didn't even think about trying a gibson guitar, it just didn't enter my mind. Mabad :rolleyes:
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It really depends on what you're looking for. I was always a rocker and always played Les Pauls until EVH came along. Then I got a Kramer Pacer, then I got an Ibanez RG-560. But I was still a humbucker guy.
But then I started hearing about Eric Johnson and SRV, so when I started to cover these guys, I had to have a Strat. And although I recognize the differences, I'm comfortable with both. They're different tools for different jobs.
 
I love my strat..its my baby, I also love my Ibanez, only not quite as much, just because I haven't wned it for 11 years like I have the strat. I dont believe that any guitar is 'perfect'. There's always something that that one guitar doesn't have that another does. Thats why a lot of people have more than one guitar.

And at the end of the day...(wait for it...)...it's all a matter of personal etc etc etc blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda...(you know the drill :p )
 
I don't believe in perfection, but for that woody neck pickup tone, the Strat comes close. It's also the most comfortable guitar to jump around on stage with, in my experience Teles, Les Pauls, Ricks, SGs, Jazzmasters and countless super-strat metal guitars all have their unique plusses, but none can truly better the Strat as an all-round performance tool.
 
I'm sure a vast majority of les paul guys wouldn't use anything else. I was just wondering of there are any les paul guys that got tired of the 14-pounder around the neck and have learned to make due with a humbucker-equipped strat.

Being a strat guy, I'd think that if you put humbuckers on there, you could get a B- in the Les Paul blindfold test as far as it sounds to the LISTENER - at least for standard-issue rock and roll. I know a Les Paul plays alot different from a strat, so are there any aftermarket necks that can help a hard tail strat get a passing grade from the PLAYER?

There have been alot of guys in the past that seem to have tried to turn a strat into a Paul, and the new sam ash junk mail has a couple attempts from Fender and other manufacturers. Do the Les Paul lovers absolutely detest these guitars, seeing it as a bicyclish copy of their Harley Wide Glide?

Can a strat-style guitar be tarted up to be a lighter-weight, battle-ready, way-cheaper Les Paul stand in, or, as is it true, as my friend used to say, that "you can't polish a turd"?
 
cephus said:
I'm sure a vast majority of les paul guys wouldn't use anything else. I was just wondering of there are any les paul guys that got tired of the 14-pounder around the neck and have learned to make due with a humbucker-equipped strat.

Being a strat guy, I'd think that if you put humbuckers on there, you could get a B- in the Les Paul blindfold test as far as it sounds to the LISTENER - at least for standard-issue rock and roll. I know a Les Paul plays alot different from a strat, so are there any aftermarket necks that can help a hard tail strat get a passing grade from the PLAYER?

There have been alot of guys in the past that seem to have tried to turn a strat into a Paul, and the new sam ash junk mail has a couple attempts from Fender and other manufacturers. Do the Les Paul lovers absolutely detest these guitars, seeing it as a bicyclish copy of their Harley Wide Glide?

Can a strat-style guitar be tarted up to be a lighter-weight, battle-ready, way-cheaper Les Paul stand in, or, as is it true, as my friend used to say, that "you can't polish a turd"?
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A Strat is a Strat and a Paul a Paul, and never the twain shall meet.
 
hotshotup said:
I guarantee everyone who says they hate strats is under 25, strats are like fine wine and need to be appreciated and the younger generation of kids playing today don't understand where their music came from and part of that history involves the strat. I used to not understand all the hubub when I was younger, but now that I'm a little older I get it. Man I wish I held on to some of those. But I'm not faulting them for it, it's not their fault, it's the media and culture that guides them, but I'll bet when they get a little older, that if they're still playing music, that they will have a different view. Not everyone of course, some just never will like the feel of one and thats personal, but the majority i'll bet will have a different outlook, and it'll start when they start to trace where their music came from. just my opinion though.
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I'm recording some young guys in the studio right now. I think I've made converts of them. I had them try out my US Strat and they are hooked. They just couldn't believe the feel and the sound. Now of course it's got a dimarzio in the bridge and a floyd rose trem and they were playing through my mesa dual rectifier so that may have had something to do with it.
 
ggunn said:
A Strat is a Strat and a Paul a Paul, and never the twain shall meet.
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I was thinking about a guy I knew, when I was a teenager and he was a real working musician. He had one of those nasty bullet trussrod strats with the big peghead and the super small frets. There is so much clearcoat on the neck you'd swear it was carved from lucite and not maple.

He took all the strat guts out and put in 2 dimarzio creme colored humbuckers and a les paul style switch and knob arrangement. He also had it refretted with really big frets and had them dressed way way down. I think he told me they were bass frets if I remember correctly. He told me that he did it because he had a duane-alman kind of les paul and he didn't want to put the miles on it anymore. He just got some "piece of crap" fender and made it function (to him) as a les paul.

How Princess-and-the-pea do you have to be to play guitar? Is 6 strings and a couple pickups enough? I like to think I can make a noise on anything except for that awful infomercial guy's guitar.
 
cephus said:
I'm sure a vast majority of les paul guys wouldn't use anything else. I was just wondering of there are any les paul guys that got tired of the 14-pounder around the neck and have learned to make due with a humbucker-equipped strat.

Being a strat guy, I'd think that if you put humbuckers on there, you could get a B- in the Les Paul blindfold test as far as it sounds to the LISTENER - at least for standard-issue rock and roll. I know a Les Paul plays alot different from a strat, so are there any aftermarket necks that can help a hard tail strat get a passing grade from the PLAYER?

There have been alot of guys in the past that seem to have tried to turn a strat into a Paul, and the new sam ash junk mail has a couple attempts from Fender and other manufacturers. Do the Les Paul lovers absolutely detest these guitars, seeing it as a bicyclish copy of their Harley Wide Glide?

Can a strat-style guitar be tarted up to be a lighter-weight, battle-ready, way-cheaper Les Paul stand in, or, as is it true, as my friend used to say, that "you can't polish a turd"?
Click to expand...


It's true. I've been a Les Paul guy for a long time. But I did get tired of the weight, so I bought a Wolfgang. 2 humbuckers, nice carved top, etc.
But it didn't have the sound. It was close, but not the real thing. And people notice. The average lay person can't describe the difference, but the comments I get are like "Man, that wood guitar sounds soo mad when you play it." or something like that.
But nothing sounds like my old Strat either.
 
if i ever got a second (electric) guitar, i would definitely get a fender single coil, to mix it up over my fat LP humbucker sound. and yet a strat may be too radical for me (funny saying that, since it's almost as ancient). ideally i'd love a Tele, but with a modern selector switch for some nifty out of phase tricks.

something like this installed-

http://www.deaf-eddie.net/guitars/5-tone.html
 
I used to have a strat clone with a humbucker on the neck and TBH it sounded nothing like a Paul.

All these guitars sound different.
I'd love to get the set.

Right now my electrics are a Strat, LP Studio and a PRS copy.
Next it's gonna be a Gibson ES335, and after that some big fat Gretch archtop :D

It would be terrible if the strat was the 'perfect guitar', as then I'd have no excuse to go round guitar shops playing all these beauties, and eventually buying some of them ;)
 
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