However the guitar may feel harder to play, so try to find a compromise setting by trusting your ears and your fingers. If the fingerboard is set too flat the strings tend to buzz against the frets and a very slight degree of upwards curve (aka neck relief) can prevent this.Įven if you aren’t experiencing fret noise, you may notice that the tone becomes warmer and fuller as relief increases. Strings vibrate in an arc with minimum displacement near the nut and bridge. You may also discern a bit more of the Strat’s springy ‘internal reverb’ and you can enhance this effect by removing the spring cover.įor a Strat to sound its best, the strings must be able to ring cleanly and this is achieved through adjustments to the truss rod tension and saddle heights. In contrast, floating the trem tends to open up the sound and allow the treble harmonics to ring a bit clearer. Some claim it improves sustain – Clapton is a fan. It’s up to you whether you prefer to block it off, have downward movement only, or float it for up and down pitch shifts, however what you choose does have some bearing on sonics.īlocking off a trem by wedging a piece of wood between the block and the back of the spring cavity tends to thicken the midrange and soften the transients for a more compressed tone. The alchemy of setting up a guitar is deserving of a publication all of its own, so we’ll restrict ourselves to the aspects that have the most impact on tone – and that starts with the vibrato. Base your string choice on what sounds good to you, the pitch you prefer to tune to and the gauge you can realistically manage. Also consider the material, because pure nickel sounds warmer than nickel plated steel and round cores will sound more ‘vintage’ than hex cores. Remember that SRV detuned a half step, which would have made the 0.012-gauge sets he preferred when his fingers were sore feel more like 0.011s.
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However if you’re struggling to bend a full tone and your fretting hand cramps up after a few minutes, your guitar may indeed sound great, but you won’t. This is based on a firm belief that the starting point for tone is a Strat that is properly set up and sounds good acoustically.Ī great setup means two things – the guitar will play well, and you’ll actually be able to play the damn thing for more than five minutes! That may seem like a statement of the obvious but Stevie Ray Vaughan’s reputed predilection for ultra-heavy strings has led plenty of us to ponder the optimum pain to tone ratio.įat strings can sound fantastic with vintage-style single coils because they solidify and fatten up the tone, and provide higher output levels without the dullness of overwound pickups. Beginning with string choice and setup, we will consider hardware and electronics before moving on to pickups.
The topic is approached from various angles in the order we believe they should be addressed. Over the next 12 pages, we’re going to provide you with what amounts to a holistic approach to Stratocaster tone optimisation.
This principle applies to all guitars, but none more so than the Stratocaster. Nevertheless, in this tone quest, addressing the system as a whole is more likely to produce the desired results than a potentially dispiriting and financially ruinous cycle of smaller upgrades. Although it must be said, buying electronic components, lumps of metal and so forth is a lot less exciting than waiting six months for a set of boutique pickups recommended by some random forum dude to arrive from the frozen wastes of Alaska. When we think about improving our tone it’s just too easy to focus on the micro and ignore the macro.
Despite its familiarity, its charms are still the source of mystery and wonder to many guitarists today. From Hank and Buddy through to Jimi, Clapton, Gilmour, Knopfler, SRV and beyond, the Fender Stratocaster has been at the heart of popular music for more than six decades.
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