TEMPTATION, THY NAME is Squier. Over the last few decades, Fender’s Squier brand has blossomed from a line of low-budget entrylevel models into an affordable series of instruments that serve the need of all walks of players from beginner to pro. Whereas Squier guitars often were a bit drab and ho-hum compared to genuine Fenders, today the brand offers models that are quite impressive, versatile and even sexy, like the new Squier Paranormal Custom Nashville Stratocaster.
Squier’s Paranormal series is the brand’s more experimental line of guitars, offering features like custom pickup configurations and hybrid body and neck characteristics. The Paranormal Custom Nashville Stratocaster is a great example of that mix-and-match aesthetic, featuring a Stratocaster-shaped poplar body with Custom Telestyle top and back binding and “slab” construction without contours plus a Tele-style pickguard. The bolt-on maple neck also has a Strat-style headstock and features a laurel fingerboard, 25.5-inch scale, 9.5-inch radius, C-shape profile and 21 narrow/tall frets.
The Strat/Tele hybrid configuration really comes into play with the pickups. The single-coil bridge pickup is angled and mounted in a stringthru-body Tele-style bridge plate with three chrome barrel saddles; the neck pickup is a Telestyle neck single-coil with a chrome cover; the middle pickup is a Strat-style single-coil; and all three pickups feature alnico magnets. Controls are mounted on a Tele-style chrome control plate and consist of a Strat-style five-position blade pickups selector, master volume and master tone control that pulls up to engage the neck pickup when the blade is in position 1 (bridge, for a Tele-style bridge/neck combination) or position 2 (bridge/ middle, to provide a custom setting with all three pickups).