Shadow1psc
New member
This is the only picture of it I'll have for now because I'm still in between houses, but here it is! After all the advice of you guys in my quest to find my nostalgia in a CAR strat (because I wanted one exactly like my dad's), I've got this MIM 2011 Fender Standard Stratocaster. I had this shipped from a Guitar Center in Chicago all the way to So Cal. It was labelled as used, but if I would have seen it in store first, I wouldn't have known the difference.
The guitar looks and feels pristine. I walked in knowing that if I didn't like it I would just return it and continue the search. I sat down in front of a Fender Hot Rod Blues Jr and started jamming. Regardless of what it sounded like (which was good!), I was surprised that I really liked the neck, the frets, and only when I got home did I realize that the fretboard wasn't maple! The neck is of course, and the wood looks superb and detailed, not just clean and boring. I got comments on the finish from everyone, it just pops and is everything I wanted.
As I'm between selling my house and buying a new one, I didn't get to plug it in to my Mark V yet, but I found some amazing settings in my POD X3 Live for it. I really like position 2 (Bridge+middle), position 1 feels kinda thin. Positions 3-5 are all nice too depending on what I'm doing. In front of the Fender amp at GC, I noticed that it's very responsive to gain and its own volume knob. With the digital modeling a lot of the settings suck the life out of the strat, but that's to be expected. I can't wait to put this straight through the Mark V's channel 1 mode.
Thanks for everyone's help in my other thread about how much I should pay for a strat, because this was definitely a good choice. I could have gone American Standard/Deluxe, but this fits what I wanted perfectly already. It may need new pickups, but what doesn't (and isn't that why we're all on this forum in the first place)?:naughty:
