About thirty years ago I bought a not too expensive Japanese Fender Stratocaster in red, nothing fancy about it as we weren't scrutinising back then as we do today, so it had the stock pickups and controls of the day on a medium priced Jap Fender Strat, which these days people immediately suggest should be swapped out. I was satisfied with it for a few years until I discovered this forum, where all sorts of advice was been thrown around. I posted some tunes that people liked and commented on favourably and all was well until I mentioned it was a Japanese Stratocaster and then suddenly everybody could hear something not quite authentic about the tone. As a result I foolishly feared they may be right, so I bought some expensive custom pickups for it with USA pots & switch, on a mint green pick guard and discarded the original pick guard with the pick ups and controls and stored it in a drawer, continuing to use the guitar and eventually buying a AAA birdseye maple neck for it and discarding the original one, selling it on. It sounded marvellous, as good as my '63 original Strat and it's been a good guitar to me for a lot of years. However, I continued to collect guitars and I'm now in a position where I have over 70 and some are no longer playable because of their neck profiles not suiting my chemo therapy damaged hands. I kid you not, a millimetre in size or curve of a neck profile can make the difference to me, so this guitar was one of the ones marked up for sale.
Yesterday I put the original parts back onto the body with this AAA USA birds eye maple neck and when I'd set it up and tested it, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It sounds fantastic with it's original (budget Jap ones) electrics and as close as any of my expensive Custom Shop Masterbuilt guitars costing ten times the price. I actually felt stupid, like I'd made some big mistakes back all those years ago by listening to all the Shadows 'experts' who insisted that the guitar had to have certain pick ups and pots, I spent heavily buying a lot of stuff that I had been led to believe was necessary to achieve THAT SOUND. Anyway the result is this, that guitar stands me at just over £400 and it's the birds eye neck that makes it that high, but it has a sound to die for if you're into the early Shads sound.
When I took my top spec expensive pick guard off which now had the £200 Sliders pick ups fitted, then re-fitted the stock pick guard with the stock pick ups, that the 'experts' claimed were no good, the guitar sounded exactly the same as it did with the expensive ones and I was amazed. I have to laugh when I think of all the guys that have spent thousands of pounds changing and swapping out their Japanese/Chinese pick ups because of bad advice, me included.
So that's the story and I'm going to make a short video to put on You Tube, playing that guitar so people can hear it compared with my original '61 as well as expensive Custom Shop Strats
