This Strat has an all-walnut neck with the "skunk-stripe" down the back where they embedded the truss rod. It has the single patent number 3,143,028 at the head, the 4-string "butterfly" tensioners, and a bullet truss adjustment. The neck is a 3-bolt "micro-adjust", and the fretboard inlays are black.

Aside from the obvious pickup mods, I built some custom electronics into it to make it an active axe. Internally, it has a couple of ultra-quiet op-amps, low voltage clipping diodes, and some discrete FETs that provide both linear boost and a nice rounded fuzz. The three sliders you see control output level, overdrive, and input (to the fuzz) drive. Three toggle switches (just stubs... they got in the way, so, I trimmed them) control power on to the electronics, passive / active mode, and fuzz / nofuzz. Between each of the pickups, you can see a little spot; those are power indicator LEDs.

I keep thinking about putting some modern low-profile depress/release switches in to replace the nipped-off toggle switches, but so far, it's just an idea.

The whammy has been tossed in the trash (I always thought whammy bars were for wussies) and there are only three springs in the whammy assembly at the rear, because I had to make room for a 9v battery to run the goodies. The only effect of this is that the bridge is up a little higher, as if the whammy bar were a little deflected; it tunes fine, the action is as low as is even remotely practical, and the intonation is still 100% spot-on. If you put the springs back in and found a replacement whammy bar, it'd be restored to normal operation.

How does it sound? Well, how do you think an electronically boosted guitar with humbuckers would sound? Yep, that's how it sounds. Like a tiger in heat. But you can still get "Stratty" sounds out of it by selecting the middle pickup. The drive to the onboard electronics is buffered by a FET and is perfectly impedance matched to the pickups, no matter what combination of them you use, so the quality of the on-board linear amp is excellent. If you use it that way and plug it into a tube amp, it'll smoke your ears. You don't want to do that to a bipolar transistor input, of course - it sounds like poo on toast, you just get square waves.

The electronics are great; the mods to the guitar's body are, shall we say, "not great." I used a drill — yes, a drill — as a router to make the spaces I needed in the body. For my trouble, I got a nice crack at the lower wing of the body. I was lucky nothing else went wrong. I got a free bonus, though; because the cavities are extremely rough, basically a series of different depth drill holes next to one another, there were no nasty resonant side effects and the guitar still sustains perfectly.

#music #guitar

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