There are enough guitarist Dopers - or simply music fans who know and appreciate what a Fender Stratocaster is - that I will take a chance and post this extreme geekery. Heck the Flying V thread got a few posts, and this is important in guitar-land, dammit!
Okay: Did you realize that modern Stratocasters really don’t sound the same as the originals? Even the recent, historically-accurate-enough-that-we-feel-comfortable-charging-you-$5,000-or-more-for-them Custom Shop (or non-Fender boutique) replicas don’t come close.
Don’t believe me? Listen to this half-minute clip. This link takes you to a thread on The Gear Page, my favorite general guitar site. The user **hogy ** - who, by the way, is a partner and lead builder at Komet, one of the BEST handmade amp makers working today, bar none - has posted a link where you can hear his original, first-year-in-production 1954 Strat vs. a super-high-end Fender Custom Shop reissue. While the replica sounds wonderful and is full of what we have come to think of as Stratty Goodness, the original sounds wholly different and, to my ears, better. There is a lot of ways to detail out why, but at it’s heart is what I state in my post on that thread (where I am WordMan also) - the tone of the replica is thinner and anemic compared to the richer, warmer, rounder tone of the '54.
So - is this just too much geekiness for Dopers to withstand?
I can easily hear the difference and I prefer the reissue, assuming that the '54 is the first guitar we hear and the reissue second. Sacrilege!! There are indeed additional harmonics audible when the '54 is being played, but some of them are too discordant for my taste. I listened to the recording 10 times. If I had to buy one of those guitars based solely on the sound of that recording, I’d pick the second guitar without hesitation.
I guess I simply have no taste. The upside of that is that I’m satisfied with relatively inexpensive guitars.
You - no taste?! Please; I’ve heard you play . The point is that there is a difference - an obvious one. Neither is better in any objective way. I prefer the original, but then again, I am a P-90 guy and it sounds much closer to that. I will say that the Reissue sounds more “like a Strat should” - in other words, over the years, the tone we have come to expect from a Strat has been shaped by the models and artists we hear the most. They have taken advantage of that “like a Strat should” tone and created music best suited to *that tone * - so I completely understand what you say about the harmonic layers on the '54 - they take up more space…
Wordman - Some of the discussion we’ve had over the past year or so about tone have caused me to wonder sometimes if my ears still work. My recent experience with the Yamaha SG-2000 I told you about along with the clip to which you linked convince me that my ears work, but my opinions may differ from some well-informed people.
Couldn’t’ve said it better myself. Chardonnay and Cabernet can be equally great wines - and people can have favorites. I just love learning more - everybody wins.
Oh, to be at home where I could crank that puppy up. From what I could discern on a muted work pc, I’ve gotta go with the original. Just sounded “richer”, that term representing the pinnacle of my musical articulation skills.
My neighbor just bought a new Strat which I’ll get to play tomorrow night. Sadly, I’m not anticipating it being anywhere near the quality of either of those two.
WAG: do the pickups on the 54 use alnico magnets, and are they extremely degaussed? Do they attempt to age the pickups on the newer strat?
Before making a judgment as to which I’d prefer, I’d like a chance to play both guitars the way I’d play rather than go by what someone else is playing. There does seem to be more high-end response on the newer one.
ETA: That’s one 54 strat, which probably sounds a little different from every other 54 strat. My bet is that the new strats are much more uniform in sound.
Oh yeah - they use original-material parts and have countless ways of replicating the wear that older parts experience. I don’t understanding degaussing other than it weakens magnets, but there are TONS of threads on guitar sites where this type of stuff is played out in all its geeky glory.
Clearly, playability matters side by side with tone - those are the two factors that matter most when picking a guitar, with looks I suppose a distant third.
As for vintage guitars, new guitars and consistency - unfortunately I must disagree. Guitars - even solid-body electrics - are made (mostly) from organic materials. They are ALL inconsistent - e.g., I have played dozens of made in Mexico Tele’s and Strats and they are wildly inconsistent - some I would love to own and others I wouldn’t use to row a boat. And Strats come in so many model variations now that two different Strat types can easily sound nothing alike.
At best you can say that a certain model or design tends to have a certain sound - Strats are versatile and have a thinner, single-coil sound; Les Pauls have a beefy, low-end crisp, more compressed tone. What’s interesting here is that this sound clip - along with the second data point I have of playing a real '54 and some reports I have read on line - shows that the “prototypical sound” of an original Strat is different from the “prototypical sound” of how we think of Strats today.
Another interesting (to me, anyway) thing to consider is that the sound we hear from high-end vintage reissues today may be closer to what we would have heard from a 1954 Strat in 1954. I wonder how the reissues compare to recordings of Strats from the mid 50s. Same with Les Pauls. I wonder if not many 'bursts were sold back in the day because they didn’t sound quite as good new as they did when they had a few years on them.
I have read, in some long-ago Guitar Player mag, that early Fender pickup coils were wound by hand. Humans are inconsistent, and some coils would get too many or too few windings. The writer felt that accounted for some of the standouts in early Strats. What’s your take on that?
How much diff could you get with the string size difference between the original and the reissue?
Ah - a great question. Debated by vintage geeks the world over: Did they start out sounding this way or did they age into it?
In this corner:
The legendary recordings featuring this guitars where made when many of them were new or well under 10 years old. Clapton’s seismic work on the Beano album was made on a then-7-year-old-or-so sunburst Les Paul.
Recent under-the-bed discoveries of still-mint-and-unplayed guitars suggest that they played and sounded amazingly well out of the box.
Evidence put forth by guitar geeks with engineering background on the fundamental difference of certain components - most usually the “old growth” wood that is simply less available for guitars today but was more common back then.
In that corner:
The obvious differences that age and wear can have: what we guitarists ridiculously refer to as…(he says embarrassingly) “mojo.” Lordy do I hate that word. But any player who has played a truly old vintage, a “relic’d” recent reissue that has been degaussed, fingerboard-edge-rolled-and-top-scalloped and finish-crazed with the best of them, and brand new ones will typically agree - they sound different. Vintage ones can really sound different from the relic’d ones, which in turn can sound different from the new ones. NOT better - just different.
This is the stuff that drives geeks like me nutty - and I am fully aware that I am getting whipped into a froth by really pedantic stuff here. It’s what geeks do.
Oh, the pickup windings were all over the map! No question this had an effect. The most famous example is the first Gibson PAF (“Patent Applied For” - the has become the nickname for these first-gen models) humbuckers. They were hand-wound and supposed to get 5,000 turns on each of their two coils - but it was done by getting close to 5,000, switching off the manual rewinder (or maybe just taking your foot off the power pedal) and letting it coast to a stop. So you not only ended up with a wide variation in the number of winds, but the windings between the two coils would normally end up mis-matching. The whole point to having two coils was to make each’s resistance by having the same winds - having mismatched winds fundamentally changed the effectiveness of the pickup - and the tone; mismatched PAF’s have just a drop of something that makes them different. Only when Gibson came out with Burstbucker reissue pickups did they replicate the mismatch - before then, the reissues were perfectly matched - and many folks didn’t like them.
Geek extra credit: in fact, the manually wound pickups were sometimes “scatterwound” - meaning that the low-paid manual laborer would not ensure that the wire coiling on the bobbin was taken up in neat rows but instead just kinda randomly spread. And some folks really think this is a major tone factor - to the point that the after-market pickup makers specifically state if their models are scatterwound or not.
As for string gauge - well, on the same guitar, different strings gauges can have a huge effect on tone. A top musician friend of mine recently went back to 9’s on this Tele from 10’s and found the classic Tele spank he thought he had lost when he adjusted the action a few months ago - it was the string gauge. In terms of this Strat comparison - well, the lighter-gauge strings on the real '54 should sound thin - the fact that they don’t, even compared to the replica with heavier-guage strings on it - is that much more evidence that the real '54 is a big tonal distance away from the replica…
the Gear Page’r **hogy **is at it again - he posted an extensive set of clips of vintage 50’s through modern reissues of Stratocasters. In wine parlance: a vertical tasting!
For any Strat-heads, this could be the ultimate reference guide.
Way too extensive for me to comment on - just thought you’d want to know…
One last bump - I checked the thread on the Gear Page and the OP has posted a few more samples, including the bridge pickups for almost all the Strats and a far less-expensive Strat.
Again, I haven’t had time to go through them all enough to try to voice a POV - but I am sure as heck saving that Gear Page thread for my reference library!
By the way, does anyone know the Doper Stratocaster? I wonder if he knows about this thread? I saw him mentioned in that MPSIMS thread about Dopers we appreciate and thought to let him know about this thread, but his profile isn’t set to receive emails…
. The point is that there is a difference - an obvious one. Neither is better in any objective way. I prefer the original, but then again, I am a P-90 guy and it sounds much closer to that. I will say that the Reissue sounds more “like a Strat should” - in other words, over the years, the tone we have come to expect from a Strat has been shaped by the models and artists we hear the most. They have taken advantage of that “like a Strat should” tone and created music best suited to *that tone * - so I completely understand what you say about the harmonic layers on the '54 - they take up more space…
I saw him mentioned in that MPSIMS thread about Dopers we appreciate and thought to let him know about this thread, but his profile isn’t set to receive emails…