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--- In , "supertwangreverb"
<supertwangreverb@y...> wrote:
> Yeah, I was talking about the USA strats that they refered to as
> the "American Standards." Sorry I should have been more to the
> point. I still think the early 90s were one of the crappiest years
> for those standard models. Veneer body and most of them weren't
> alder as Fender had said, but they were poplar or might have been
> basswood.
Well, they may not have been as good as many others, but, again,
trust me, they were much better than late-seventies and early-
eighties Strats, which were atrocious! There was a reason why Fender
was losing money and almost was shut down by CBS before they decided
to just sell it.
One of my three Strats is a '89 Strat Plus, which was an 'upgraded'
American Standard (it had a Wilkenson roller nut, Spertzel locking
tuners, and Lace Sensor pickups). I bought it new in '90, and this
has been my main guitar until at least '99, and I continue to play it
a LOT. Most of Interstellar Stomp by the Space Cossacks was recorded
with that guitar in the original configuration. Two years ago I had
my tech change it pretty dramatically to basically vintage specs: put
in the '57/'62 reissue pickups, get rid of the Wilkinson nut with a
regular white fake-bone nut, and replace the two-point AmStd tremolo
with a vintage-style Fender tremolo. I LOVE this guitar now. It
sounds every bit as good and maybe a bit better than my two '62
reissue Strats, and it plays like a dream.
Why did you come to the above conclusion? Just because your guitar
may not be good, doesn't mean that all of them from that era were
bad. I think it's universally agreed that Fender quality has been
pretty high once the pre-CBS era began, and that includes Fender's
AmStd models.
Ivan
