Texas Blues Strat Buying Advice

[mountain man]

Uh huh. Eric Clapton bought his guitars stock and preferred to buy the most used strats with patina finger wear on the fret-board. He said it was because those guitars were shown a lotta love. So that was "Brownie" and "Blackie." David Gilmour bought his black strat stock at Manny's in New York. Jimi Hendrix played stock strats as well. He played a bunch of them as he was known to set them on fire..... John Fogerty? yep, stock strats. Rory Gallagher played a stock 61 strat. It was reputedly the first in Ireland. Stevie Ray Vaughan's strat was a 63 strat with a 62 neck and 59 pups.

I'm just another man on the forum but it seems to me the best advice on buying a strat? Buy one! Just get one you like! And then get a decent amp! And for the SRV sound? A tube screamer...........

 

[PapaBear]

Uh huh. Eric Clapton bought his guitars stock and preferred to buy the most used strats with patina finger wear on the fret-board. He said it was because those guitars were shown a lotta love. So that was "Brownie" and "Blackie." David Gilmour bought his black strat stock at Manny's in New York. Jimi Hendrix played stock strats as well. He played a bunch of them as he was known to set them on fire..... John Fogerty? yep, stock strats. Rory Gallagher played a stock 61 strat. It was reputedly the first in Ireland. Stevie Ray Vaughan's strat was a 63 strat with a 62 neck and 59 pups.

I'm just another man on the forum but it seems to me the best advice on buying a strat? Buy one! Just get one you like! And then get a decent amp! And for the SRV sound? A tube screamer...........

Well one does have consider that fret wire has grown significantly in the modern era, Clapton likes those old fret boards because the frets are nearly nil

 

[mountain man]

Well one does have consider that fret wire has grown significantly in the modern era, Clapton likes those old fret boards because the frets are nearly nil

I have the Eric Clapton Artist Series stat and it's not like the old strats he played like Brownie or the early Blackie. A new Blackie became an artist series with noiseless pups in the 80's. Long after his first "Blackie" in the 70's. His new Artist Series strat has a 9 volt battery for a mid frequency boost and has the TBX circuitry and noiseless pups. The reasons were that Eric wanted a more Gibson sound with more mid range. The neck on the Clapton Artist series is amazing, so is the neck on the Jeff Beck Artist......... So these are not the guitars that Eric was milling around in the 60's and 70's trying to find....... The early Clapton stock strats that he played were closer to the SRV strat..........

 

[Rancid Rumpboogie]

You can no longer buy a stock Strat that sounds anything like the stock guitars of back in the 60's / early 70's like Hendrix played and Clapton's Blackie ... no matter how much "vintage tone" hype they may have. And to get good, serviceable actual stock pickups from back in the day you will pay through the nose to the tune of a thousand or so per pickup. I am old enough to actually remember playing those late 60's / early 70's Strats and remember what they sounded like. It was precisely the search for that tone that made me put five sets of pickups in my MIM Strat. The 5th set nailed it, and those pickups were Klein '57 Epic Series pickups. Then I put series wiring in it, and that magniffied the hum from those excellent pickups, and that lead me to discover Zexcoil noiseless pickups ... I thought when I ordered those that I would be disappointed, but boy was I surprised because the set I got also nails that tone.

 

[Scotty R]

Anthony's taken it a step further and compared the buy vs build options for a "SRV Like" Strat. Good video, and I learned a lot....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNK4M7_V4GA

 

[Rancid Rumpboogie]

As most of you know, I am strongly in the "build exactly what you want camp". Both of my Strats are assembled from parts. Neither of them were inexpensive, both were done with a "no compromises, only the best, screw the cost" mindset. I don't even know what they ended up costing me. But both have features you just can't buy in any off-the-shelf Strat for any amount of money, especially the switching and wiring. My Warmoth Strat (the red one) was built with a Warmoth hollow body and compound radius neck. My MIM Strat started life as a MIM standard but all that's left of the original is the body and jack plate ... literally ... everything else has been replaced.

The red wine one has Zexcoil pickups, the flame maple one has Kinman noiseless pickups. You can't buy any off-the-shelf Strat with either.

Both of them are keepers, I will never sell or trade either of them for any amount of money.

 

[snarf]

I saw that new vid yesterday while I was working. I liked that he was pretty objective with his presentation, and that he stressed at least a couple of times that building your own is seldom going to retain the value that you put into it. Makes me think of my ADE Strat that I handpicked all the parts for after touring the factory out in CA several years ago. I was all set to buy a surf green Deluxe when I found out that I was headed out to LA for a week. So I decided to see what they had to offer in the little room on the side, and that's what I ended up getting.

I know that if I ever sold it, it's basically a partscaster and that's the price I would get for it. Yes, I handpicked the parts at the factory and one of their builders put it together (guy's name was Dave and I got to talk to him for about an hour while I picked out the parts), but to anyone on the outside looking in, it's got a body that was part of a special run that's paired with a neck from another run, tuners that weren't part of either of those, CS pups that I'm not sure have ever been stock in a Strat, and a Deluxe bridge on a Standard body. Imho, it's my CS Strat without the CS stamp on the headstock. To the rest of the world, it's a partscaster.