Sunday, August 2, 2009

The Lore Of The Stratocaster Guitar

By Aaron Shanty

Throughout the history of the guitar, since it's design and inception, there have been quite a few models and designs that have made a real impact on the music world. Not just because of the way it was built and designed or that they feature the newest and best looking styles and components, but that they have been used by the best and greatest players of guitar of all time.

The most popular guitar would be the Fender Stratocaster. First made by guitar making legend Leo Fender, founder of the world leading Fender Guitar company back in the 50s, the Stratocaster or Fender Strat as it is also called, has taken it's place amongst the legends of rock. Now having a enthusiastic following from younger guitarists and vintage guitar experts alike, the Strat still leads the best of current popular rock groups.

The 1957 model of the Strat is most likely to be considered to be the most sought after of the near sixty year run guitar classic. The 57 release features the famous 2-tone sunburst coloring, usually orange fading to red or yellow and black and can be seen being played by guitar heros such as Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin during the recent years. After it's launch all those years ago, the Strat was mainly used for playing Blues until the likes of Hendrix transformed it into another dimension and started pushing the guitars boundaries and rock music to it's limits and into a new era. Jimi was one of several who was able to operate with the Fender boffins and the Fender Custom Factory team to design and release his own white signature model of Strat. Leo Fender was well known for encouraging and allowing the worlds best guitarists to work along side them to not only manufacture their own personally designed signature models, but also reinvigorate their existing designs through customization.

The Fender Stratocaster has been used on a wide variety of different musical sounds over the years from jazz to blues. It's clean, clear sound allows the guitar player have the freedom to make any sound and type of music accessible and the perfect build quality of each Fender Strat is second to none. The body of the strat is constructed from alder wood and the neck is made from all maple with a rosewood fretboard. The guitar includes a set of three single coil pickups which helps give it the clean, classic and pure sound. There is a 5 way selector switch that allows you to switch through any combination of the three pickups to generate different tones and a set of knobs for tone and volume.

The Strat is undoubtably a guitar name that will go down in history as being a near perfect and extremely versatile instrument that really helped change the face of rock music and guitar sound as we know it. Little did Leo Fender did not know that when he first made the Strat long ago in his workshop in 1950, he would also be instrumental in starting a cult that will last forever.

About the Author:

0 comments:

Post a Comment