CLEAN MACHINE

If the Fender Stratocaster is such a perfect design, why – wonders Dave Burrluck – is there a whole industry of aftermarket parts and pickups to improve it?

It’s 71 years since the Stratocaster was unveiled to a less than rapt audience. Over those past decades, however, it’s become the best-selling guitar of all time. Well, we suspect that’s true. Many have lauded it as the ‘perfect’ design – ‘Leo got it right first time!’ – and countless non-Fender craftspeople have made their own-version ‘Stratocasters’ with just minor changes, or not. Yet, certainly from the early 70s, a whole slew of designers thought they could improve this perfect design, and today there are probably more aftermarket parts – hardware and pickups – to ‘upgrade’ the Stratocaster than any other electric guitar.

So what exactly was, and is, ‘wrong’ with the Stratocaster? There’s not one single part, from string tree to strap button, that hasn’t been ‘improved’ by someone. And then there’s the Strat’s ‘Achilles heel’: its single-coil pickups, which, as we all know, pick up hum that can ruin a gig or recording if you’re unlucky. One very common fix is the reverse-wound, reversepolarity (RWRP) middle pickup, which can at least provide hum-cancelling in the combined pickup positions.

“Bucking the hum has fuelled its own industry… but hum is part of the deal with Stratocasters”

Back in the day, this weakness didn’t bother Fender who only got around to a humbucker in the early 70s, and that design hardly nailed ‘the Fender sound’. But bucking the hum has fuelled its own industry of Clever Trevors and created hum-cancelling single-coil-sized pickups using two coils, stacked on top of each other or side by side, not to mention active humbucking designs from the likes of EMG and latterly Fishman.