Category: Guitars

I’m ending my mini review series with the guitar which helped get me back on my musical journey — the Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster. It’s the guitar I never wanted. Ever since my youth, I’d seen the Strat as a symbol of Rock machismo, and the choice of Guitar Heroes around the world.

So what changed my mind? I actually played one.

Well, I played a few, to be fair. They were unremarkable, but this one was a completely different ball game. It felt like it had been made specifically for me, apart from the colour — I might have chosen something other than pink — but when I found myself playing Shine On You Crazy Diamond in the shop, Pink seemed a strangely appropriate colour.

Nearly 2 years on, and I wonder what it is about this guitar which makes it special. It’s not just me too. The shop salesmen all commented that it had been getting a lot of praise and admiration from the punters. They were a little sad that I bought it, because they wouldn’t be able to play with it when the shop was empty. So, what is it?

The first thing I always notice when I pick up a guitar is the neck, and this one has an unbound oval C profile maple neck with a worn-in satin clear nitro finish, a dark rosewood 7.25″ radius slab fretboard, 21 medium frets, and a 42mm bone nut. It fits my left hand perfectly. Rhythm and lead styles work equally well, and I love the vintage radius.

The Strat’s belly cutaway was a revelation when I first tried one, and cannot be underestimated for a person who equally enjoys pies and pints. Relearning the guitar after 30 years was definitely made easier with the Strat’s ergonomic touches.

The 2-piece alder body also has a nitro finish. There is something special about the weight, solidity and resonance of this guitar which seems to help with its tone. Maybe it’s the alder. Maybe it’s the nitro. Maybe it’s the ideal weight, at just over 8lb. Maybe it’s the custom shop builder’s attention to tonewood selection. I can’t put my finger on it.

The pickups are vintage 60s style, and look nothing special. Like the rest of the guitar, they are made to look older than they are, and this includes the vintage pole piece stagger, which has the side effect of boosting the 3rd plain string. Looks can be deceiving. They sound amazing, and have bags of chime, warmth, and character.

The bridge is a vintage style 6-point floating tremolo with cast steel block and saddles, just like you’d want. The saddles are artificially aged, but this doesn’t seem to have affected their capacity for fine adjustment. I’m not a fan of tremolos, but they do seem to add a certain character to the tone, even if you don’t use them.

The rest of the hardware is pretty standard for a 60s Strat. Vintage Kluson tuners, 5-way pickup selector, witch hat pots, and a triple-ply white pickguard (which has gone a bit green), concealing a neck-butt-end truss rod screw.

To complete the illusion of age, the finish is what Fender calls Super Relic. I do feel that this can be likened to buying pre-ripped jeans, but I can appreciate that the pale green plastic, tarnished nickel, eroded finish, and scratches and dents galore, gives the guitar a certain feel. And not only that, as the most expensive guitar I own, I’m not so worried about bashing it.

Next time, I’m going to look a little deeper into what maybe makes a guitar good. But will I ever find out?

Continuing my series of guitar reviews, I’m going back to the Gibson SGM, which I bought from Fab Music back in 2019. Despite dithering over this purchase, and coming back for it 6 months later, it has turned out to be one of my most-used guitars.

It’s a Gibson 120th Anniversary edition (2014) SGM, to be precise. The M in SGM stands for Min-eTune, the infamous electronic tuning system. It’s based on the bottom-of-the-range SG Junior. And, while it’s not one of the finest examples of Gibson’s work that you’ll ever see, it suits me just fine as a no-nonsense lightweight humbucker with 24 frets and a nice set-up. Plus, I finally own a Gibson.

It’s not pretty. The cherry finish is patchy, and the fretboard rosewood is grainy and weird, but when a guitar plays this well, I can overlook its cosmetics. The ’61-style zebra Alnico V humbuckers have a nice warm punchy sound suited to clean or distorted tones, and the slim C profile satin neck and double-cut body makes light work of accessing all 24 frets.

Due to its light weight (6.6lb/3kg), you hardly know you’re carrying it. Surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to affect its sustain much — maybe it’s the glued neck joint. And, once I’d replaced the awful Min-eTune with a set of Kluson vintage-style tulip-buttoned tuners, not only is the guitar lighter, but the headstock is less prone to dive-bombing (a common SG complaint).

The modern narrow/tall frets take a bit of getting used to, but as its last set-up included a good fret polish, this actually makes my heavier touch a bit easier. Like my Kasuga Deluxe, the string spacing at the bridge is around 50mm and the nut is 43mm wide. Coupled with the standard Gibson 24.75″ scale, this makes any Les Paul player right at home, with a slightly slinkier compact feel.

I’m glad this ugly duckling stayed in the shop for my return.

My recent purchase of an Epiphone Sheraton II was an accident. I’d actually gone shopping for an archtop semi-acoustic guitar, and failed miserably. I still don’t know if I haven’t yet found the right one, or perhaps archtops just aren’t my thing. The Sheraton was more appealing, and I still had quite a few more new guitars to try out before the wallet was ready.

I was offered a play on a shiny new Fender Telecaster, but I wasn’t impressed. Before moving on, Jason (main man at Fab Music Store) pointed out the G & L guitar directly below it. It was a plain-looking T-style guitar I hadn’t even noticed.

G & L? The name vaguely rang a bell. Then it came to me: I had read about G & L in The Birth of Loud, a book about the history of the electric guitar. The name comes from George Fullerton and Leo Fender, the guys who grew Fender Guitars from a radio shop into a huge international success, selling it to CBS in 1965.

The ASAT looked like a Fender Telecaster, but with three main differences:

• The headstock shape was subtly changed, to avoid being an obvious copy.
• The pickups looked plastic and nasty.
• The bridge/tail was completely redesigned, having six saddles and being very compact.

Well, it’s not pretty, but I thought I should at least give it a try. That’s when the grin started — it played and sounded great. It seemed that those ugly duckling pickups were actually magnificent swans. They sounded hot, and they had bags of attitude, like beefy single coils with muscle.

The combined 6-saddle bridge and top-loading hard tail didn’t exactly look premium either. But it is a solid piece of metal, and neatly overcomes a couple of t-style design flaws. Firstly, the 6 saddles make it easier to fine tune the guitar’s intonation — something I am particularly sensitive to. Secondly, a locking Allen key removes any lateral movement in the saddles, making a significant difference to sustain.

Add to this a mahogany body and a 9 inch radius rosewood fretboard, and it starts to feel like something quite special, which is maybe why they called it the ASAT Special.

But, why ASAT? Apparently, they wanted to call it a Broadcaster, after the original 2-pickup Telecaster. But Gretsch intervened (again) over copyright grounds, because they have a trademark on Broadkaster. George and Leo had a well known penchant for space age names, and they liked the sounded of ASAT, the anti-satellite missile.

Recently, I saw a baby blue Gretsch archtop for sale in a Facebook post by my local guitar shop Fab Music Store. As I had already given up once on the idea of buying an archtop, I thought I should at least try a Gretsch. So off to Fab Music I went.

At the risk of repeating myself, despite being prepared for a purchase, it didn’t work out that way. The Gretsch was nice, but it wasn’t amazing. So I thought, while I was in the shop for the first time in months, I might as well try a few more guitars, shouldn’t I?

I was disappointed that the Hofner Verythin CT which I’d tried during my last visit had been sold. I wasn’t looking for a semi-hollow body then either, but I had taken a shine to it anyway. This time, I decided to try a few ‘335-alikes’. And, very soon, I had taken a shine to an Epiphone Sheraton II VS.

I’d never really seen the point of these sort of guitars. They look nice, sure, but what’s the point of body cavities and f-holes if they don’t project much sound? I didn’t worry too much about this at first, because it was really nice to play. Plugged in, it sounded rich and smooth, without being overly bassy or dull. And the sustain was remarkable.

A look at the specifications, and it’s rather un-remarkable. Made in China, it’s a fairly standard maple and mahogany build with a 22-fret Gibson scale and PAF-style Alnico pickups. It’s finished nicely though, despite the gaudy gold hardware, and the 12″ radius slim set neck is a delight. It’s a big guitar, weighing in at 4.0kg (8.8lb). So maybe size does matter.

I tried a few more guitars, one of which I really liked [more on this another time], but I finally came back to the Epiphone, and the Gretsch went back on the wall. I took the Sheraton home with me.

It needed a bit of work on the nut, neck relief adjustment, and a tidy up of the routing and a minor setup. Now it’s my go-to guitar for a rich mature treacly sound.