The Yellow Strat

It's funny what one Youtube video can achieve. The one I'm referring to was the official Boss demo video for the then-new DD-7 digital delay pedal. Of course I loved the sound of the pedal, and bought it not long after. But notice that the guy is playing a Suhr Strat copy. Those few seconds did all the difference in the world for me. It was a little bit of a revelation about an instrument I had once bought and then let waste away for almost a decade. Here's the story.

To start off, we need to take a trip back in time, to November of 1996. I wasn’t even looking for a new guitar that day. My friends were going to the music store to buy bass strings and drum sticks, and I tagged along to keep them company. That’s when I saw it on the wall: a yellow Fender Stratocaster, the like of which I had never seen. I didn’t even have to take it down from the rack and try it out, I knew it was going to be perfect, and it was.

It was a weird feeling coming home and preparing my black BC Rich Warlock for the trade-in. The dust that was stuck between the guitar body and the Cliplock mount had been there since my high-school death metal days. There were many memories, but it never occurred to me to get sentimental about it. That guitar had served its purpose and it was time to go back home to the Strat. I will never forget that afternoon, walking around town with the black Fender case. I have seldom felt that proud and happy.

This was my main guitar for four and a half years. For the longest time, it even made me forget that there had once been this Yngwie Strat that got away. Much of this was the yellow finish, which obviously evoked both Yngwie's 1972 Duck as well as his signature guitar. The guitar had everything I wanted and felt just perfect. That all changed the day I came home with my first-ever Gibson Les Paul. It really felt like it took me about an hour to get used to the infinite sustain and growl of the humbuckers, the shorter scale and the flatter fretboard. From that moment on, my yellow Strat languished in its stand, essentially forgotten. Whenever I picked it up to play it, which was something I did because I felt that I had to, not because I wanted to, I had to literally dust it off. In the end, I had to come to terms with the idea that maybe I wasn’t a Strat guy after all.

Then something happened. I reinvented my guitar playing and much of my approach to guitars and gear. Around that point I happened to watch the aforementioned Youtube clip, which left me slack-jawed with the revelation. You just can't get that sound out of a Les Paul; it takes a Strat to do that. And that led me to the painfully obvious (even idiotic) conclusion that a Strat is actually not a Les Paul. It’s its own thing. It doesn’t have the fatness and sustain, but it has a clarity and earthiness that no Lester could ever duplicate, and those ergonomics are simply unsurpassed. The episode made me realize that the two guitars have complementary strengths and weaknesses, and it is difficult to get the best of both worlds. Consequently, you need one of each. The salient point is that you can’t set your amp for the Les Paul and then expect to be able to switch to the Strat just like that.

Those weren’t all the issues I had. I had had intonation problems with the Strat for years. They were really weird: no matter how many times I checked the 12-fret note vs. the harmonic, using various different tuners, it came out all right. But whenever I played an open G chord, the fretted low G would be audibly sharp. I tried lightening my touch, but no matter how softly I played, that note would be annoyingly sour. I checked the fretwire for wear, but it looked all right. I had had the exact same problem with my BC Rich a few years before; that too had come out of nowhere. I was at a complete loss. Still, I had no inclination whatsoever to take the guitar to a tech, because I was well aware of my limitations and didn’t want to get chastised.

Stepping down my string gauge from 10–52 to 10–46 solved all these issues in one go. It turned out that there was something pretty subtle going on. Upon further reflection, the intonation problems hadn’t actually appeared overnight. They had only started after I tuned the respective guitars back up to E standard. It turns out that thicker strings vibrate less near the nut and bridge. That shortens the effective string length, wreaking havoc on the intonation on the lowest frets. Evidently, tuning down had loosened the wound strings enough that it had never been an issue—just like I didn’t have any problems whatsoever putting the exact same gauges on the shorter-scale Les Paul. It is possible that the nut slots were too tight for the thicker strings, but I don’t care. The problem got solved and I had something akin to an explanation and I wasn’t going out of my mind.

It was a wonderful experience approaching my old Strat with a new mindset, since it truly felt like discovering it anew. For almost two decades, I had been lowering the middle pickup so that it sat flush with the scratchplate. At first I was just mindlessly mimicking Yngwie, but when I got out of that I realized that otherwise, my pick was hitting that pickup all the time. So, back down it went, and for the longest time, I was only ever using two out of the five pickup positions on the Strat: mostly the bridge, with the occasional neck thrown in for leads and cleans. When I was getting back into Strats, I also rediscovered how great the middle pickup can be on its own, an interesting, almost Swedish-style compromise that incorporates a bit of the neck and a bit of the bridge. So the pickup went back up and has been that way ever since. I find that the middle pickup is perfect for rockier slightly driven tones, because I basically have a lead boost built into the guitar. Just go to the bridge pickup and I get more presence and slightly more drive. I would of course be amiss if I didn’t mention the out-of-phase 2/4 positions, but I have never really got into using them.

The magical spring of 2008 culminated in another trip to the US, this time to Boston, where I decided to take advantage of the extremely beneficial USD to SEK exchange rate and reward myself with a new electric guitar to celebrate my recent level-up. I came home with a new Fender Telecaster and subsequently spent most of my waking, non-working hours playing it. This did not reflect well on my old Strat, whose stock plummeted. If this was what it was like playing on a new Fender, I wanted nothing to do with my old one. In spite of everything that had gone on that year, I came even closer to posting a classified ad for the yellow Strat that fall. I played a black maple-neck Strat at the local store, fell in love with it, and somehow managed to walk out of the store without it.

I had one card left to play, and decided to try it. Maybe I had simply grown sick of seeing the yellow Strat around? Therefore I did an experiment. I put the guitar in its case and told myself that I would hold off on playing it until I really felt like it. Somehow, that exercise unlocked something in my brain. Already the next night, I felt an unstoppable urge to see it again, hold it and play it, and that has never wavered since then. I’m very grateful that one of my primary personality traits is laziness, i.e. that I never followed through on my threats to get rid of it.

Yellow’s place in my collection has never been in doubt since then. It simply took a while to get it to play and sound just right, not because it was a complicated procedure, but mostly because it worked well enough, and when it didn’t, I always had the Telecaster. Getting it to fly right was a twofold process. First I wanted to find the perfect pickups that gave me the sound while being completely noiseless. After ditching the Yngwie-style setup (HS-3 bridge + YJM neck), I went with the Fender Hot Noiseless set for a few years, which worked great. But I got this idea that I wanted to play the Strat more, and maybe installing humbuckers would do the trick. Single-spaced DiMarzio rail humbuckers worked all right for driven tones, but I found myself missing the classic Strat sounds. The Area 58 I had put in the middle position was however promising enough that I left it alone, and got two more to put in the other positions. That did it, that was the sound, and ten years on and I am still massively satisfied with that setup.

Getting the guitar to play just right required trips to two different techs. The first guy did a superb job of intonating and setting the guitar up properly. The second tech wrought the real magic. After almost 20 years, the neck had developed a slight kink around the 16th fret, where the neck meets the body, so that it fretted out when bending on many of the top frets. The guy was able to sand the frets down slightly, eliminating the issue. It had never been a dealbreaker, but the minute I sat down with it after that I was overjoyed.

I love how this guitar has turned out. After all this time, and all the twists and turns, it is very satisfying to feel exactly the same as I did when I originally brought it home. I have played dozens of Strats in music stores and at trade shows, and there are nice ones out there, but there is no place like home. I feel extremely fortunate to own not just one but actually two Fender Stratocasters, both of which are just about the best Strats I’ve played. Of course it’s natural for me to say that. After all, they’ve moulded to me just as I have done to them.