Apart from the Gibson SG (of course) this is probably my favourite guitar.
Eric Clapton used this exact model on his tour around the late 80s.
The main difference with a normal Stratocaster is the pickups and the wiring, it features 3 active Lace Sensor pickups which are amazing! best pickups a Stratocaster can have, they don’t make a lot of noise and they are just really versatile.
The wiring consists on having a mid-boost, and it’s really useful when you are playing leads, just crank up the tone knob and you get extra loads of distortion, of course you can also use the volume knob for this but who doesn’t need a bit of extra gain when everything is already at 10???
The colour is also quite unique, “Pewter Grey” is the actual name, and I believe it came in other colours, the neck is absolutely beautiful being maple you can actually see the pattern, but it does come in glossy mode… which I dislike, but I used a really thin sanding paper and took that right off, it doesn’t affect the guitar in any way but it improves the payability, otherwise your finger sort of drags on the glossy finish and it just feels slower.
The tremolo is quite useful and it does not go out of tune, however due to Eric’s specification this model has a small piece of wood in the cavity which blocks the tremolo so you just need to take the back cover off and remove the piece of wood, and it works just fine.
They are not too expensive…usually around £1,200 but if you are looking for something similar but don’t want to spend that much, you can always get a Stratocaster Plus, which are pretty much the same thing.
Stringed Guitars 