It’s likely down to some combination of the darker tonality of early tweed amplifiers and the high-treble requirements of the Western swing players who were Leo’s clients, but it’s easy enough to remedy and if you can solder, it shouldn’t cost a thing. Many have wondered why Fender’s original design chose to provide tone controls for the neck and middle pickups but neglected to provide treble roll-off for the pickup that actually needed it most. Add a bridge pickup tone control To connect the bridge pickup to a tone control, most modders move the middle tone control connection over or use a jumper for the bridge pickup to share the middle tone control Peel them off and clean up any residual stickiness. Many necks have labels and stickers in between the screw holes. Try a sliver of hardwood veneer if you need to shim. A shim is often needed to achieve an optimal neck angle – and it’s accepted practice – but rubber grommets, cardboard and scraps of sandpaper are not ideal. Pop the neck off and you can find various horrors in the pocket. Wood-to-wood contact is ideal – but this isn’t the way things generally turn out. To resonate together as one, the body and neck of a guitar should be coupled as tightly as possible. Even if you don’t plan to change your block, it’s worth popping off the bridge plate to scrape off any paint that may be applied to the top. With either of these, you should get extra brightness, definition and sustain. UK equivalents are available from Wudtone, and Kevin Hurley sells his blocks on eBay, both relic’d and non-relic’d and in narrow and wide spacing. Callaham’s vintage-spec blocks are excellent but expensive in the UK. Use a magnet to test if your block is steel – if the magnet falls off, it isn’t. The brand now sells a Pure Vintage version. Image: Fenderįender originally used 10oz cold rolled steel (CRS-1018) blocks with shallow holes for the ball ends, and these are generally regarded as being effective tone enhancers. And consider steel trem blocks Fender’s Pure Vintage Stratocaster Tremolo Block. How can you have a vibrato-loaded Strat that can be tuned up in a single pass and won’t go out of tune when you snap a string? Simple: tighten the spring claw, place a lump of wood between the bridge block and the back of the vibrato rout and slacken off the claw to allow string tension to wedge it in place. Some Strat players never use the vibrato – Robert Cray and Billy Gibbons prefer hardtails – but most consider the springs to be an essential component of the Stratocaster sound. Block the tremolo Using five strings, tightening the spring claw and wedging a piece of wood behind the block will give you hardtail tuning stability with spring-loaded tone If you can’t push the plate screws straight through the body holes, you should have them drilled out to increase their diameter. Assuming there’s no shim, this could be because the screw holes in the body are too narrow for the screws. On occasion, you can see a gap between the bottom of the neck and the neck pocket, even when the screws are fully tightened. On top of that, the neck may actually move around, causing tuning instability and even string slippage. If a guitar’s neck is loose in its pocket, it will be less effective at transferring vibrations. Others are relatively cheap, and we’d advise you to investigate all the options before spending big money on exotic parts… because with a few judicious tweaks, a bit of basic wiring and some routine maintenance, that old Strat may yet surprise you. The emphasis of this article is on optimising the basic instrument, and many of these modifications won’t cost you a thing. In retrospect, 1965 was not ‘year zero’ for Fender because these changes occurred gradually – even if most were instigated by CBS bean-counters. It became apparent that various changes had been made to Fender’s manufacturing methods and materials. Could those characteristics be replicated with newer instruments? As the prices of vintage Fender Stratocasters went stratospheric, the guitar community began to ask why the old ones sounded different. ![]() There was a time when vintage Fenders were thought to sound superior to newer ones simply because they were old, and most players were content to leave it at that.
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