The Perfect Working Guitar for Me
I was so impressed with my Fiesta Red Squier Bullet Hardtail Strat that I bought a second one. However, being on such a lower-than-low budget I had to be patient.
UPDATE: This guitar now has a PAF in the bridge.
I wanted a new one, but I also wanted to get a bargain price, as I had on the Fiesta Red one (I got that for £82 GBP on Ebay). I must have regularly search the Ebay ads for months until one day where the timing couldn’t be more perfect I found just the one!
The timing was perfect because it was just after I had come into a little bit of money, allowing me to treat myself to an affordable guitar and also co-incided with an imminent visit to the UK, which is where the guitar would be delivered for me to then bring it home to Asia.
This one was arctic white and the price was £89, so I snapped it up before I missed it. The saving was only £20-£30, but seeing as I was planning some upgrades it made a difference.
I made the same , tried and tested hardware upgrades as I had on the Fiesta Red Bullet; namely the Göldo Hardtail Bridge from Thomann and the Kluson-style tuners – this time, some unbranded ones, very similar to the Harley Benton ones from Thomann.
I refinished with a tin of Nippon paint that is supposedly a Honda colour – “Jerez Blue”. It looked like it might be close to the aged Lake Placid Blue that I’ve tried to emulate in the past using Candy Blue, but with very little success. As it turned out I think this is as close as I could ever get to the colour I had in mind. That was a result!
The pickups I already had lying around; a couple of alnico 5 Strat pickups and the bridge pickup that came out of my Fender Japan Jaguar, which I’d upgraded already. That pickup went in the middle position here and it’s the nicest middle pickup tone I’ve ever heard in a Strat. I’m tempted to try a Jaguar pickup in the neck position of a Strat or even a Telecaster at some point.
This guitar excels at clean tones. Well actually it works very well with gain too as it remains very clear sounding with these lower output pickups. It’ll likely never get lost in the mix, but I think of all my guitars this maybe does bright, snappy cleans the best.
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Can you point me to the €15 pickups you demo’d on your YouTube channel?
They are all over Ebay. Just do a search for “Set of Alnico 5 Pickup”, “Alnico Strat Pickups” etc.
The ones I got are the set with the low-output bridge pickup (5.6k) on Ebay UK
They come from China, so I don’t know if you’ll get them at the moment. I’d say China is off limits for ordering stuff right now, but who knows?