Guitar Story #17: 1995 Fender MIM Stratocaster
Details
- 1995 Fender Standard Strat
- Year Purchased: 2015
- Price Paid: $400.00
- Notes: Upgraded by previous owner
The Stratocaster is a hard guitar for me to love. I’ve had 3 others before this one. They make me crazy. If I don’t have one I get drawn to them. If I have one I start to hate it. Part of the problem is that I’m a bridge pickup guy. I’ll sometimes use other pickups when recording or dicking around but I need the non-squishy immediate feel of a bridge pickup 99.9% of the time. It’s really easy to make the Stratocaster’s bridge pickup sound like shit. There are things you can do to tame it a little like add a metal bottom plate or wire it up to the second tone control but part of me wants to make a Strat work on its own terms.
This was another impulse buy. I picked it up 6 years ago on a very Indian summery day. The light though the shop’s window fell on this guitar and lit it up like Excalibur in Wayne’s World. It’s very pretty. It’s a 1995 Mexico made Standard Strat. After I got this guitar home I found to my delight that the previous owner had replaced the pickups and all the electronic bits with good USA stuff. The pickups are Duncan SSL-1s. It has a gold anodized pickguard and Fender Locking tuners.
The beauty of Fender’s designs is that you can crank out a pretty serviceable version really inexpensively. That’s not true for the Gibson style guitars. For me anyhow. I can’t deal with cheap set neck guitars or bolt-on Gibson knockoffs. They don’t feel right.
I’ve played this guitar around the house a lot. It works really well with fuzz. It’s also great for doing dreamy echo-y reverb-y soundtrack-y stuff. It records really nicely too. Until very recently I believe this this this Strat was all the Strat I ever needed.
