STRAT ORIGINS
Celebrating 70 years of the Stratocaster: a story of evolution in guitar design and revolution in guitar music
The Fender Stratocaster is the most successful electric guitar design of all time. No guitar has shaped popular culture like the Strat. Its double-cutaway design is the acme of guitar shapes, arguably the most copied, the most easily recognisable. The Stratocaster’s cultural legacy, ignited in 1957 when Buddy Holly debuted it with the Crickets on The Ed Sullivan Show, transcends the instrument itself.
Its story is not just about its impact on guitarists’ imagination. And yet as a musical instrument, a piece of engineered design, it has remained relevant, a fact that rests upon its player-friendly ergonomics, with contouring to accommodate the forearm and to sit better against the body, the versatility of the three-pickup format, but also a subtle but telling evolution in its speci cations that has often been led by those who played it. Some of the standard specs we see in Fender’s Stratocaster lineup today –the ve-way switching, bridge humbuckers –came from players. Before 1977, Strat players had to manually manipulate the three-way switch to get those inbetween sounds of Positions 2 and 4, the sort that Jimi Hendrix popularised.
The modular build allows players to modify components or swap them out entirely. Not getting along with the tremolo? Block it o . If it’s got screws you can unscrew it; if it has got solder, it can be rewired. You would not be the rst to execute the Dan Armstrong/HSH wiring mod that connects all three single-coils to the neck tone control, allowing you to use the middle tone control to select between regular single-coil operation or to combine the neck and bridge pickups with the middle in series for humbucking tones –anew trick for an already versatile guitar.
Do you want more from your bridge pickup? You could t a steel inductance plate under it, then remove it if you don’t like it. Don’t like the neck shape? Someone will sell you a spare. That’s how Eric Clapton’s Blackie came to be. It was a buyer’s market for Strats in 1970 and Clapton was buying. Taking full advantage of the bolt-on build he had the neck from his alder-bodied ’56 Strat swapped out for a ’57 neck, its V-shape more to his liking. He changed the pickups, too, kitting Blackie out with a greatest hits of Strat pickups so far. In a coupe de grace, he blocked out the vibrato, too. Blackie was his “mongrel”. In Pasadena, California, a young Eddie Van Halen was paying attention…
Some of the most radical specs found on today’s Stratocasters were borne of artist collaborations, such as the onboard fuzz circuit on the Steve Lacy ‘People Pleaser’ Strat, or the 12dB mid-boost circuit of the Juanes Strat. Ed O’Brien’s Strat has a Fernandes Sustainer at the neck position. Does all this mean
