The 1957 Fender Stratocaster is one of the most sought after guitar collector items fetching astronomical prices, I saw one recently advertised for US $35,000 and in Australia you would be looking at closer to AUD $100,000. So thank goodness Fender had the good sense to release the American Vintage series. The American Vintage ’57 is a perfect recreation of the classic instrument with the added bonus of modern electronics and the included but not installed 5 way selector should you wish to upgrade the guitar to modern standards. It has the original style 1 ply pickguard, 21 frets and 1 piece Maple V Shape neck with a Nitrocellulose Lacquer finish. The bridge is an American Vintage Synchronized Tremolo and the machine heads are Fender®/Gotoh® Vintage Style Tuning Machines. The guitar comes in a very cool Tweed case and has a few accessories thrown in like a vintage style strap, guitar cable and an 'œAsh Tray' bridge cover.

The ’57 Strat you see in the video above was loaned to me by my friend Rob from Soap Creative who had the 5 way selector installed. The lacquer on the neck is a little sticky but that will naturally wear down in time and should you wish you could always gently help it on its way. I am used to the tuning stability of a double locking trem system so I expected to have to constantly tweak and fiddle but I honesly only had to retune the guitar once during 2 hours of recording and that was after some excessive whammy antics. The guitar has amazing acoustic resonance and in the 2nd and 4th position the pickups really accent these acoustic properties. I used a combination of Amplitube Fender and Guitar Rig 4 for the recording and it was so easy to dial in classic Strat tones from Peter Green to Jimi Hendrix to David Gilmour to Yngwie Malmsteen (ok you can get close but the vintage voiced pickups aren’t really meant to match Yngwies’ DiMarzio’s). Admittedly you are better off choosing a guitar with a bridge humbucker for heavy rock and metal but I still managed to get decent rock tones that I thought weren’t going to be possible. The neck pickup just oozes blues and with a flick to the 4th position and a tube screamer style overdrive you immediately have SRV style tones at your disposal. Even with a fair amount of gain the single coils were pretty quiet. The trem is obviously vintage style and is meant for the more subtle approach rather than divebombs, you will hear at the end of my Pantera riff demo above that even when fully depressed you can’t get the strings completely slack, this isn’t what this bridge was meant for, instead it excels at subtle vibrato and is great with chords – check out my Albatross snippet for an example of this.

I hope you enjoy the demo, this guitar is so playable I didn’t want to put it down and really didn’t want to give it back to Rob! I have always been a Fender Strat fan and have often lusted after one yet never owned one but having played this guitar a classic style Strat has jumped its way up my wish list.

Check out Fender.com for more information about this guitar.