DoctorPaul's Guitar Emporium - Sold Guitars

(FOR SALE)

2006 Fender USA Stratocaster

"Muffler"

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Take a look through the 'Past Guitars' page and you'll see that I don't generally like strats. Or rather, I WANT to like 'em, but it never seems to work out. I like the way they hang, I like the way they look, I like the way they feel and, when I'm playing the right kind of stuff, I like the way they sound. But ... well ... you know. They're just Strats.

 

SO, my plan was to buy a REALLY nice one, to see if I could finally convince myself that strats are cool. I looked at a LOT of them; artist models, Custom Shop stuff ... but the more I looked at those, the more I figured that they were going completely in the face of what Leo Fender wanted. Strats and Teles (and P-basses) were designed so that hundreds of them could plop off the end of a production line with no sight of an actual luthier, just regular guys screwing the bits together. They weren't MEANT to be scrupulously hand-made over a period of months by a master luthier. So a lot of the stuff that I played just struck me as unnecessarily expensive trinkets ... and certainly not what a Strat should be. I wanted a Strat that was badass, but that was simple, straight-forward, and that plopped off a production line, as Leo intended.

 

Enter "Muffler". No mess, no fuss, beat up to hell, and really great value. This hangs well, plays really nicely, and sounds ... well ... like a strat. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether sounding like a strat is a good thing!  After a fair while, I reckon that I've actually learned to like this one. 

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This originally had Fender's "greasebucket" tone controls, with the bottom tone wired to the bridge pickup, which makes a lot of sense, as it allows you to dial out some of the 'ice-pick' treble of the bridge tone. The more I play it, the more I like it.  I'd been on a SEVERE Knopfler kick when I got this, and it suited that down to the ground.  I liked it.  I liked it very much.  Other specs?  It has an alder body, 'Modern-C' maple neck with a 9.5" radius rosewood board, medium-jumbo frets, a vintage 6-screw trem, staggered-pole alnico pups (now binned) and a thin 'acrylic laquer' finish.

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This had a long-term place in the collection, until I got an offer out of the blue to trade it for "Lily".  Unfortunately that was an offer that I couldn't pass up, so it was packed up and shipped out ...

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Thankfully though, the new owner contacted me a few weeks afterwards to say that something else had caught his eye, so did I want it back?  Yes, yes, I wanted it back.  A price was agreed, and Muffler came home to Poppa.  I made a point of shifting stuff around so that I could put it back in the racks in exactly the same space that it had lived previously ... it was like nothing had ever happened.

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Not long after it came back, I was lucky enough to snag "Abigail", and it quickly became apparent that I had no need whatsoever for this guitar.  Faced with the prospect of selling it on, I decided to give it a real kick up the arse, and to make it sufficiently different to justify keeping it.  So, I bolted on all of the kick-ass electronics that I once had fitted to my Malmsteen (Mollusk) ... then this thing took on a whole new personality.   Although the above photographs are now a little out of date, this now has a set of three DiMarzio high-output blade single coils, with each pickup routed to its own volume control through a five-way.  Each of those volume controls is also a push-pull coil-split, so it can be set to switch from delicate single coil tones to the frenzy of a crazy-high-output (single coil sized) humbucker at the flick of a switch.  As the DiMarzio pups looked more than silly against the old-school relic finish and aged pickguard, I went for a combo of new DiMarzio pup covers ... they make them in a ridiculous number of shades, and chose a combination of cream and aged white.  Although a strat with blade pickups is always going to look a little odd, I think that the pickup covers help to tie things in so that it at least LOOKS like it all should fit together.

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Altogether, I think that the combination of a cracking little guitar and a set of face-melting pickups has elevated this WAY above the level that it should sit at, to the extent that this gets LOTS of playing time ... Despite my reservations, perhaps modding IS the way forward!