Hot Gear Friday: The Swiss Army Guitar
By Mitch Berg
The word “iconic” is overused these days. I try to avoid it.
It’ll be hard in this next bit.
If you are not a guitar player, and someone says “electric guitar”, it’s more than a little likely the first guitar you picture in your mind is a Fender Stratocaster.
There are other electric guitars – but if the world had to explain “electric guitar” to an alien, this would likely be the example of choice.
The Fender Stratocaster turns 70 this year.
Radio repair man turned inventor Leo Fender could not possibly have known what he was starting when he began designing the Strat in the early 1950s. Perhaps because he wasn’t a guitarist, he approached the design differently, with an eye on not just manufacture but also repairability. Hence the bolt-on, rather than glued-in, neck. He had hit the mark a few years earlier with the Broadcaster, later renamed the Telecaster due to a legal wrangle with rival manufacturer Gretsch. He also designed the Fender Precision bass. Both were instant successes, popular with western swing bands, but the Telecaster was and remains a slab-like, utilitarian workhorse – two pickups, no nonsense. And as much as musicians loved its sound, they often complained that its square edges dug into their ribs and banged their hip bones.
The Strat, with its neatly nipped navel and two-horned cutaways, is probably what first comes to mind when anyone hears the words “electric guitar”. Millions of players have learned on a Strat – whether made by Fender, its budget Squier imprint, or one of the numerous companies producing copies. Many others dream of owning a top-of-the-range model from the Fender custom shop, costing a five-figure sum. Then there are the secondhand Strats with one previous famous owner. The black 1969 model that Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour played on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall went under the hammer for almost $4m, in aid of a climate change charity.
They are famously versatile – their electronics provide thinner tone than the beefy Les Paul, but the three pickups are out of phase with each other, which helps give the Strat a dizzing sonic variety.
There’s reedy and out of phase:
To piercing, with tones you didn’t know existed until you played them:
To pretty much anything you want:
I finally got one, three years ago. It’s a Squier – but it gets the point across.
April 19th, 2024 at 1:14 pm
The Stratocaster is Ritchie Blackmore’s preferred electric instrument. Every time someone picks up a guitar and plucks out “Smoke On The Water”, remember that it started with a Strat.
April 19th, 2024 at 1:30 pm
I can’t resist it….do you accept…cash?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwcZUa5NW4g
April 19th, 2024 at 2:19 pm
You can do amazing things with phase distortion.
Remember how you could always tell when you were talking to someone on a landline pre-2000 as compared to how good modern phones with VoIP sound? That’s because way back in prehistory the Bell System decided that to stack a bunch of phone calls on a line meant that they would create “channels” (think carrier waves) on their wires, where they allocated 5 KHz to each connection.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, but those misogynists developing the system were male, and the typical male’s upper frequency range is half the typical female’s.
Why does that matter you ask? It’s simple: to keep to that 5KHz bandwidth, the Bell engineers went with an elliptical filter configuration. That’s as close to a “brickwall” as you can get in terms of magnitude (nearly uniform magnitude until the corner frequency, then zero past it), and virtually no electrical signals will bleed into the other channel. That comes with absolutely screwing up the phase from 3KHz-5KHz and doing horrible, horrible things to the signals in that region. It’s why phone calls used to sound so terrible (“brightness” and “airiness” in particular comes from having good response above 5KHz), and why women’s voices in particular sounded so bad on the phone.
These days we’ve got lots of signal processing to digitize the voice calls, including compression that adapts to the particulars of the human ear, as well as digital transmission that mean that you can pack a lot more information into the same frequency range.
April 20th, 2024 at 1:01 am
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April 20th, 2024 at 8:46 am
Maybe I’m mixing apples and axles, but I thought each carrier on a regular line was 2K?
I ask because radio stations used to have to pay extra – lots extra – for a 5K line for doing high-end remote broadcasts. You could tell there was a phone line in the chain, but MUCH better than a regular phone.
April 20th, 2024 at 3:04 pm
Poking in here representing my 1989 ’57 re-issue Strat bought in Germany(post exchange) while stationed there when the Wall was up.
Longtime listener and love the show! We disagree on a few conservative things and that is normal.
April 21st, 2024 at 7:33 am
’89 ’57 reissue in the house!
I’ve got a Squier Classic Vibe with the ’60s pickup config. You can tell it’s not a US-built Strat, but only barely.