{"id":50220,"date":"2015-01-06T10:10:22","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T16:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50220"},"modified":"2015-01-06T10:17:09","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T16:17:09","slug":"the-strat-turns-sixty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50220","title":{"rendered":"The Strat Turns Sixty"},"content":{"rendered":"

2014 was the sixtieth anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster.<\/p>\n

You may not know guitars – but you’ve heard them.<\/p>\n

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NPR did a pretty decent story on the the anniversary, and the guitar<\/a>, last week. \u00a0Leo Fender designed the “Strat” as the followup to the much-more-conventional but also legendary Telecaster.<\/p>\n

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A “Telly”<\/p><\/div>\n

The thing that jumps out at the non-guitar player is the body shape – a radical double-cutaway design (allowing the guitarist to easily get to the highest notes on the neck).<\/p>\n

For the musician, there was the vibrato bar – the “whammy bar” – at the bridge, immortalized by a generation of surf-rockers and, in a much-modified form, Eddie Van Halen:<\/p>\n

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The “whammy bar”, up close<\/p><\/div>\n

And for guitarists who really, really dig into it? \u00a0The “Strat” was an incredibly versatile instrument.<\/p>\n

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The Strat’s pickups, switch, “pots” (volume and tone knobs) and wiring, from the inside.<\/p><\/div>\n

Its three “pickups” – the three little oval bars, basically microphones that turn the vibration of the strings into electrical signals that are sent to the amplifier – are connected to a five position switch that allows the guitarist to select which of the three pickups, or which combination, are live. \u00a0 \u00a0The one closest to the bridge picks up more treble, and is most useful for playing solos; the one closest to the fingerboard is usually lower and bassier, and is usually used for playing rhythm. \u00a0The one in the middle is…well, in the middle.<\/p>\n

The cool part is that the “in between” positions, 2 and 4 respectively, the signals from the fingerboard or bridge pickups are out of phase with the middle pickup. \u00a0It gives you a funky, reedy tone that is hard to describe, but impossible to miss (think “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits, or “Smoking Gun” by Robert Cray, or “The Core” by Eric Clapton).<\/p>\n

The Strat has been the instrument of choice for an army of guitarists, all over the spectrum; from bluesmen like Eric Clapton (who has been pretty exclusively identified with Strats for the past forty years) and Robert Cray, through rockers like Jimi Hendrix, to peripatatic fretboard stylists like Mark Knopfer and Richard Thompson, to jazz and big band players, the Strat has been there and done that.<\/p>\n

And it almost didn’t turn out that way. \u00a0 The Strat’s first couple of years of sales were disappointing; Leo Fender fielded criticisms of the Strat’s bright, sharp sound, causing him to design a followup, \u00a0the “Jazzmaster”:<\/p>\n

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A Jazzmaster – most easily identified with Elvis Costello, J Mascis, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Mick Jagger (during his brief, late-seventies flirtation with playing guitar) and…yours truly, whose primary axe has been a Jazz for, um, 36 years. Mine is heavily modified, by the way – I have a third, Gibson “Soap Bar” pickup between the two stock pickups, wired out of phase, like a Strat – which actually gives a version of the Strat’s signature sound. It’s complicated – but sounds pretty awesome. But I digress.<\/p><\/div>\n

The “Jazz” was designed to address the Strat’s “shortcomings”; the pickups were wired for a thicker, warmer sound, with more muted trebles and fuller bass and midranges. It was a more conservative design, both aesthetically and electrically.<\/p>\n

But in the interim, rock and roll happened. \u00a0And the Strat – a relative bargain at the time – became, sharp tone and all, the preferred instrument of a generation of rock and rollers.<\/p>\n

So successful was the Strat, of course, that the Gibson company – which had been producing the iconic, heavier, more-expensive “Les Paul”, reacted by producing a “Les Paul Junior”, with a lighter double-cutaway body; it’s better known today as the “SG”:<\/p>\n

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SG, Les Paul and Strat. I’ll take one of each, thanks.<\/p><\/div>\n

And, notwithstanding a brief flash of Beatles-driven popularity for Rickenbacker guitars (brought back by Tom Petty in the late seventies), that’s been pretty much bedrock of the rock and roll guitarist’s arsenal ever since.<\/p>\n

I’ve never owned a Strat – yet. \u00a0Someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2014 was the sixtieth anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster. You may not know guitars – but you’ve heard them. NPR did a pretty decent story on the the anniversary, and the guitar, last week. \u00a0Leo Fender designed the “Strat” as the followup to the much-more-conventional but also legendary Telecaster. The thing that jumps out at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50220"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50274,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50220\/revisions\/50274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}