Re: MIM Strat
I bought one in Dec to use as a quick and ready practice guitar and I love it, more so after making some changes. Exceeds my expectations and gets played all the time.
I was breaking strings too easily with the stock vintage style saddles, so I replaced them with ferraglides. No more breakage and no affect on tone imo.
I couldn’t live without locking tuners, so I replaced them with Fender/Schaller tuners.
I replaced all the pups, but then I don’t consider that an added cost for comparison to higher models because I expect to change the pups on any guitar I buy.
I’ve owned an american standard and a deluxe, and this thing, as it’s setup now, plays and sounds just as well as those. The standard was alder with rosewood board and had fine tone, just darker, smoother, with less bite. My MIM is alder/maple on much clearer, livelier and ringier, which is what I wanted. The deluxe was just dead; my fault for trying mail order and then not returning it (didn’t know better back then). But choosing between a deluxe and an MIM, playing and tone being equal, I can't see spending so much extra for what seem to me to be mostly cosmetic differences. Maybe if I'd found a deluxe that sounded better I'd think differently.
And I still don’t know why they drilled three large, quarter sized holes in the section under the pick guard, above the controls (filled halfway with glue). I’m guessing they were maximizing wood and drilled out some knots. Lol….at first it bothered me, but you can’t see it and I’m so happy with the damn thing that I don’t care anymore. Sure, it’s 5+ pieces of alder glued together and sandwiched between birch (or plywood, I don’t know), vs 3 or less pieces, but it sounds fine to me. But it's worth telling the story here because, unless the american versions also receive such bastardizations, it appears the MIMs are allowed to pass with such stuff.
The electronics aren’t bad, but they don’t hold up well to repeated heat cycles from changes; the switch and pot arms are loosening up. The pots still sound fine, but the switch is a little noisier. Could be my soldering technique, but I’ve never had it happen on higher quality switches and pots, which go in soon now that I’ve finalized the electronics setup. If you never mess with the electronics you’d probably never notice a difference.
I think MIMs are a great value, if you spend some time finding one out of the lot that plays and sounds well and are willing to make some minor upgrades in the areas that fall short for you. I don’t spend much time at guitar stores noodling with all of their stock (when not ready to buy), so I have no clue if it’s just as easy to find a decent MIM as a non-MIM, but I'm guessing it's less work to find a decent non-MIM.
