Never owned a strat, always judged them as a bit too common (whilst secretly coveting the tones). Paid a visit to my local guitar shop to scrounge a box for posting a guitar recently sold. Despite it being a small shop in the back reaches of the land time forgot, he is a Fender dealer and does have some nice guitars in.
There was one in particular that had impressed him which, after initially claiming to be ‘not really much of a strat man’ I tried acoustically and was very pleasantly surprised and impressed. Not just any old strat I thought.
I handed it back before I got any silly ideas and made it to within a foot of the door before hearing the invitation: ‘you should hear it plugged in...’ Well go on then. I plugged in - through a new HRD - and after a couple of minutes playing, something unexpected happened. I experienced a real emotional response to the sound coming from the guitar/amp/my fingers. It was a rare special moment and when I stopped playing, all the acoustics were resonating in sympathetic acknowledgment that I should probably buy this guitar. Anyway to save going on, I ran away quickly, packed up the guitar I was selling and returned to the shop to buy the Eric Johnson Thinline Strat!
It just feels so natural to play - the neck profile feels so good in the hand and the flat (12”) radius fingerboard, which though I’m not used to, all adds up to real effortless playing. It is just a complete package that really spoke to me, and apparently there is a backlog on orders of these so I was quite lucky to get one. I’ll still never be able to play Cliffs of Dover though!
Comments
Especially with that nice, deep f-hole...
Does the F-Hole do anything for how it sounds?