Squier FSR Standard Stratocaster HSS Electric Guitar

(Beagle not included!)

Another new guitar that I've bought in order to produce a variety of sounds is this Squire Stratocaster.

As a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, I've dug the Strat sounds forever, but have never thought that it was appropriate for the bands that I was playing in. I did once play a Mustang, though, and dug the feel and the whammy bar on that.

The silver sparkle finish on this guitar caught my eye as I walked in the door of our local Guitar Center (ooh, shiny!) and it actually plays really nice with very good action and plenty of sonic options with the 5 position pick-up selector. The humbucker pickup at the bridge is nice and powerful, with a full, distorted tone and the other two pickups give a cleaner sound with a good variation on the EQ.

The whammy bar gives a large range of movement, though this does tend to throw the guitar out of tune fairly often. This is still a pretty new guitar and I am still working on setting it up, but despite being the nature of the whammy-bar-beast, it can be a little annoying. Still, I am using this pretty regularly now and am having a blast with the expansive whammy and with the variety of sounds I can coax out of it.

For more info, here is the Guitar Center page on this instrument. It looks like it has gone up in price a little, as I got it for right about $200.00, which is an excellent price for something of this quality.

Edit - As I've been playing this some more, I noticed that neither of the tone knobs seem to affect the humbucker pickup, which is odd. The single volume knob can take some getting used to when switching to different pickups for different sounds, as well (I'm used to using one pickup at a lower level for quieter parts or even to cut out the guitar for a section). Also, changing strings is more of a challenge with this guitar since the strings come from the back of the guitar through the body. It can be a little tricky getting the end of the string from the inside of the body through the little hole in the plate in the back. I guess it just takes some experience, but it's not as simple as the Gibsons and Epiphones. But these are nit-picky complaints - I still dig it a lot!