FENDER AMERICAN STANDARD STRATOCASTER HSS

I can't believe I'm actually owning this guitar! I have been dreaming of getting an MIM fat Strat before because of its relatively not too expensive price but now I am getting this baby instead with a very good price. It's a blessing from God actually that I can own this little piece of Fender's legacy.

Strat noob
I never really own a Stratocaster before. However, I have some previous experience with my friends' Stratocasters. I tried an American Standard HH 50th Anniversary Stratocaster, a Custom Shop Jimi Hendrix Black Beauty Stratocaster and a Stratocaster that I reviewed before in my old post.

All the Strats that I tried have two common problems: sustain and tremolo. I always prefer the sustain of my Ibanez PGM to the Stratocaster and the locking tuners in my PGM works pretty well. I tried vibrating a Strat for just one bar and it went out of tune quickly. That's how I view strat before I got my own Strat. I aimed for Superstrats such as Suhr, Xotic or James Tyler instead in hope for a better quality Strat-type guitar.

Surprise!
This Strat blew me away! When it first came, I notice that it sounded and set just right out of the box. The pickups were adjusted properly, the string height is not too high and not too low, the guitar is almost in tune. It is an alder body with maple neck, it is aimed toward a more traditional wood configuration.Acoustically speaking, when you ring the B-string, you can feel the guitar vibrates at some places; this is a good sign of sustain and overtone harmonics. I plugged it in right away and I get a pretty good sustain on B, G and D strings!

Other surprise: the Corona factory set my tremolo to be floating...?? It is totally floating and I just don't feel too good about it. I tried to do some subtle chord vibrations using the trem and not surprisingly it went out of tune. So the sustain problem is gone but the trem tune problem is still there.

Modification
I instantly order a set of Fender Locking Tuners online and installed them right away. It was proven to be one of the most important modification to my AmStadStrat! I can now do some crazy dive bombs and other crazy stuffs without the fear of getting out of tune. It is still not as stable as my double locking Edge Pro Ibanez trem, but this is already good enough. Combined with the floating setup on my Strat, I can go either up or down with my trem. My goodness!!

Sound
The guitar is loaded with a pair of Tex Mex singles and a Diamondback humbucker. The TexMex is very bright, combined with the maple/alder configuration it goes even brighter. I like the clean sound of the Tex Mex pups, they are very snappy and good for quick funk chops. However, they are not noiseless; turn on your distortion pedal and get that 60-cycle hum. Turn on a compressor and you can hear a radio broadcast on your amplifier!

On the other hand, the Diamondback humbucker is good. It's a bit too bright for overdrive sounds but you can easily cure that by rolling back the tone knob a bit. This HSS configuration makes me pretty happy since I can cover a lot of different sounds just by choosing from the 5 combinations of the pickups. However, this Strat performs better on clean sounds compared to my PGM. PGM performs better on overdriven sound due to its high-powered DiMarzio pickups.


Feel
Maple neck has a glossy finish and it is pretty sleek. It does not feel sticky or anything, it's very good on your hand. It's a standard C-shaped Stratocaster neck and it is a bit rounded on the frets. The body is contoured and it has a thin Urethane finish. Feels very good and the guitar is very resonant. I instantly removed the tremolo springs cover plate and it gets even more resonant after that!

The weight isn't too bad. Alder is a pretty lightweight wood but basswood is still lighter. I can play standing comfortably with this guitar for a relatively long period of time without being dragged down too much. This guitar is built on a very high quality standard and you can feel it right away when you touch and play it.

Overall
I like this particular guitar. This HSS Am Stad Strat really beats the other Strats that I had tried. The locking tuner upgrade is by far the most important upgrade that you probably want to have on your Strats too. The sound is very versatile and this guitar in particular shines very well on clean sounds. I will probably upgrade the pickups by putting Fender Noiseless singles and a DiMarzio, still not too sure about that but we'll see.

Definitely a guitar that defines the American sound, I will give this guitar a 10 out of 10.

GUITAR FINISH AND TONE

Hi everyone, in this post I'm going to discuss a little bit about guitar finish and how it will affect your tone. Hopefully you can apply this knowledge when you are choosing a new future guitar or working on a project with your guitar.

Neglected?
Yes, guitar finish is the most underrated aspect of tone. When it comes to guitar tone, people will automatically think about replacement pickup. The truth: yes, the pickup will contribute to the guitar's overall tone to a certain degree; however, there's something that makes two guitars sound different although they use same materials and pickups.

I'm not an expert in wood and anything related to it. Nonetheless, I am pretty sure about the fact that guitar finishing will contribute to the sound-dimension of the guitar.

Good finish.
A good guitar finish is usually applied very thinly to your guitar. I can never tell directly how good is my guitar's finish but there's a way to check it. Unscrew your strap screw and see inside the screw hole how thick is the finish layer until you can see the border between the finishing and the natural wood. If it is thin and almost not noticeable, then you have a good finishing guitar.

Here are some of the usual suspects for guitar's finishing:
Nitrocellulose lacquer finish
It sounds vintage, this is the hardest one to work with and it is extremely thin. This guitar finish does not really clog the wood pores on the guitar and this lets the wood breath and age over time(which is good because then you will have a more resonant guitar by the time your guitar is 30 years old). This will make the guitar looks old though, a white guitar will turn yellowish with this finish but who cares?? as long as it sounds good, no one cares!

Polyurethane finish
A bit thicker compared to the Nitrocellulose finish but doesn't really sound worse than it. There is a caveat though: you have to apply this finish thinly and not using filler or anything between the wood and the Poly to get a great resonant guitar. Some companies don't understand this, they just spray hard on the woods and make it look sharp but in the end the guitar is pretty dead when you try to play clean. Make sure this doesn't happen to your guitar. Otherwise, when applied properly, you'll get amazing tone, as good or maybe even better compared to the nitro finish.

Polyester finish
Avoid this at all cost. This is the thickest and the worst sounding finish you'll ever get. This will dampen your guitar completely and you'll never get a good tone out of it. Sustain will not be present, there will be no overtone harmonics and you can't get that rich bright sparkly headroom that you should have.

Good finish vs bad finish.
As we compared three of the finishes above, we should already know that a good guitar finish will usually give you a good headroom and sparkle when you dial the guitar on its very natural sound-state: clean channel amp. This will help you so much when you are trying to nail some good clean tone. This is where it gets tricky: there is a trade between look and sound. It's up to you how far you will go to chase your guitar tone and cares about the look and how well does the finish protect the original wood of the guitar.

I personally don't care about the look, as long as it gets a good tone, I'm all up for it. But that's totally personal, some of my friends prefer a thicker finish so that their guitars can stand some beating on the road without looking horrible.

But I'm stuck with my guitar and it has bad finishing. What should I do?
There is still some hope on increasing the tone of your guitar in terms of finishing: SCRAP THE FINISHING ON THE BACK OF YOUR GUITAR. Some people that had done it says that it sounds very good after they took the finishing off the unseen part of the guitar. Try it for yourselves! I'll try it with my guitar soon!

I hope you enjoy this post, I'll post some more similar posts soon!

Cheers and God bless :)