Ever since its launch in 1954, the Fender Stratocaster has been, at once, the most recognisable electric in the world and the most mercurial. While Telecasters tend to deliver a somewhat familiar ride every time you pick one up, when you try a Strat for the first time it’s harder to predict whether it will be light, pristine and bright – or dark, warm and gutsy. That’s partly because, beneath the skin, the model has changed like a chameleon through the different phases in its evolution.
With the model’s eighth decade in production just around the corner, we began thinking about whether it’s possible to crown a particular point in the Strat’s storied life where it had reached perfection, the peak of its evolution as a design. A point before which everything was a work in progress – and after which everything was merely a variation on a theme. To help us answer this slippery question, we enlisted the help of some true Strat aficionados to try to identify the point at which the model reached its apex – if that exists in any meaningful sense – while gaining fresh insights into this timeless design.
Since we ran a detailed comparison between vintage guitars and their Custom Shop counterparts back in issue 443, we’re going to exclude reissues from the reckoning, since they are essentially just modified copies of the original kit. If modern Strat tone is your thing, you’ll find guides to contemporary visions of Fender’s Strat elsewhere in this feature. Here, however, we’re going to look at the seminal early decades of the Strat’s evolution and see if we can chart where the original seed of Strat design reached its zenith.
IN THE BEGINNING
When considering any classic model of guitar, there’s usually special reverence for the first of the breed – be it a 1950 Broadcaster or a 1952 Gibson Les Paul Model. But while such guitars are undoubtedly historic, it’s also fair to say that rarely do they represent a fully mature design. The Les Paul, for example, would take half a decade to reach the archetypal maple/mahogany, twin-humbucker format that continues to the present, and even then it took until the 1980s for Gibson to stop tinkering with those fundamentals.
To an extent, the same could be said of the Strat in 1954. The ash-body, two-tone sunburst model that Fender
