THE
FENDER
STRATOCASTER

My teen years were in the 1970s, I grew up on Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. I was fortunate enough to see Pink Floyd play live in London, I believe at Earls Court, and Led Zeppelin at Knebworth Park. It's mainly their music that tends to play in my head most days. Though a couple of decades or so later I also really got into the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Three bands playing very different music.

My first guitar was a ¾ size acoustic. I learned a few basic chords on it, but that's about as far as that guitar could go. Then around 1973 or '74 I bought a second hand Top Twenty electric guitar for £20. They were made by Teisco in Japan, and imported into the United Kingdom by Rose Morris, and were sold on the high street by Woolworths. I believe they retailed at around £30. It was vaguely Stratocaster shaped, had two single coil pickups and a tremolo (which I rarely used). The sound wasn't brilliant, but compared to the acoustic it played like a dream, or so I thought.

Like thousands of teenagers I had a dream of playing in a rock band and making it big. Unfortunately, I can't sing, and I was a rubbish guitar player! When I was around 20 years old, about 1980, I stopped playing for a long time. Many years later, my son would describe my playing as "rhythmically challenged".

In 2004, almost on a whim, I bought a Wesley Archtop Semi acoustic off eBay, and so started playing again, but quickly realised I preferred electric to acoustic or semi-acoustic. So, in 2005 I bought my first real Fender Stratocaster for £360. It was a Standard, made in the USA in 1998. A year later I saw a 1984 Stratocaster for auction on eBay. It was actually being sold by a local shop that specialised in used electronic goods and musical instruments. I only bought it because it was in Sienna Sunburst and just looked fabulous. I won the auction at £336. I drove over to the shop to pick it up. It looked every bit as beautiful as it did in the pictures on eBay. The sound was clean, bell like when necessary, the fret board smooth and the action low. Suddenly, I fell in love with the Fender Stratocaster.

Over the following 10 years or so, I bought nearly 100 Fender Stratocasters of varying ages. Mostly made in the USA, but some made in Japan and Mexico. Most of the pictures you'll see in this book are pictures I took of guitars I've owned at some point. I would buy a Strat, play it for a while, then sell it on. The ones I liked the most, I kept. For me, some played better than others. They were all reliable, I don't recall experiencing a major fault on any of them. The guitar I play the most is a Deluxe (in Sunburst) made in 2000. It plays really well, and has a good selection of sounds.

This book is the result of many hours of research, both on-line and from other books, from Fender price lists and catalogues, as well as my personal experience. I think I've managed to include most production models of the Fender Stratocaster made in the USA between 1954 and 2014. It's possible I've missed one or two. There were quite a few different models produced, and in the early days Fender had a habit of adjusting the specification of a model part way through the production run, sometimes more than once. Which occasionally can make it difficult to identify a particular model. Though if you have the serial number, you can usually narrow it down to a particular year, making the task a lot easier. If a Strat had a fairly short production run of say less than a year, Fender often didn't put it in their price list (the production run may have been for a particular Fender dealer), I've come across some Stratocasters that made me wonder if they're fakes, or if they were just short run production models. When just looking at pictures, it's difficult to judge, because usually there's lots of detail you can't see.

Having bought so many Stratocasters, I've discovered there are some fakes out there. So, I've also a included a chapter specifically about spotting the fakes. Usually, there are two things that giveaway a fake, one is quality. Fender have produced (and continue to produce) very high quality guitars, right across the range. One reason why they continue to be a popular choice with both amateur and professional players. The other giveaway is the fake guitars often have a specification that Fender have never produced. The mix of hardware will be wrong, or the location of the serial number, and so on.

This book is about USA production models, and not models coming out of Fenders Custom Shop. It includes a chapter on serial numbers, and that does include some Custom Shop serial numbers as well as Fender guitars made in Japan, Mexico, and South Korea. It also includes Squires made in USA, Japan, Mexico, China, Taiwan, India and Indonesia. For completeness, I felt it needed to encompass them all. It may be the most comprehensive table of Fender serial numbers you'll come across.

This may not be the kind of book you'd pick up and read cover to cover. Although the first few chapters you may want to read through. But the chapters containing the specifications of each Stratocaster, they're more of a reference. Something to dip in and out of.

I enjoyed writing it, I hope you enjoy reading it.