I played my „beloved 61 strat™“ over 25 years and modified it to my demands. During all those years it became a true friend and an important part of my tone.
Even though it is not 100% perfect, we became friends and I learned to deal with ist strenghs and weaknesses.
Unfortunately a guitar-life may come to an end and/or it has to be at the pit stop – I started to look for an adequate replacement.
Therefore I built a No.2 out of old (Fender™) original parts. I had to learn that this guitar does not meet the quality of my strat, even though I used original parts from the 60`s.
My sound:
To realize my sound, the guitar needs very spezial qualities. I love to use different tones from my guitar in my playing style.
Therefore I use the 5-way-switch to select a different pickup - sometimes a different pickupsound for a single note – and the volume pot which is modified with a special cap to save the highend when the volume is reduced. I like a guitar that has a rich high end with fast attack response – the body should not be too heavy and „breathe“.
I like classic single coils, which are not overwound, because of their transparency and dedicated/ focussed tone.
But they are very sensitive to background noise like hum and tend to sound too „glassy“ with most overdrive settings on the amp. To compensate this I use a tuned Dummy coil (we call it the „Bukka™ switch“) that can be switched with a push push pot. Switched on it reduces the background noise and makes the tone a little „rounder“, that helps especially overdrive tones. Due to the modifications the guitar works easier in a large/hughe spectrum from clean to heavy overdrive. But not to forget the „fingers“ with all that hardware.
Vintage™:
Over the years I was offered endorsement deals from time to time by different manufactures. I never could imagine to leave my fingers off the strat. Unbelivalble!!
The only option to me would be a replica that comes as close as possible to the original. Trevor Wilkinson wanted to build such a guitar for a long time. This honoures me a lot, because this man wrote history with his craftsmanship and hardware. Also his Fretking guitars I always found quite remarkable. He was about to found a new label with business man Dennis Drumm of JHS and gave me one prototype in my hands.
Et voila´: I liked it from the first impression. It had character. I told him that I found it really cool if it would be „aged“ and had a few of my modifications. Afterwards Trevor told me that the guitar was a „super-affordable“ guitar from the east which quite astonished me.
A few month later we met at a trade show. Trevor nicked my strat in one of those rare moments and put olympic white specially aged for me with a „plasta“ out of the headstock logo in my guitar stand. Though I play my demo with that „Elastaplasta Blugocaster“ as it was called from now on, it worked so good – I was astonished what you could get out of this affordable instrument.
Now I was really interested to make this guitar a dignified No.2 and we started a dialogue concerning changes and improvements. In the meantime, Trevor and Dennis made progress with their brand/label Vintage with „distressed look instruments“.
What was closer than developing a „signature model“. We wanted to show the world what´s possible for under 500€:
All my features, a great feel for playing, a good /cool look and a tone that you can work with. The performance of this instrument ecceeds my expectations in this price range: beeing a guitar to use „working horse“.
The aim never was to develop 100% custom class copy, therfore you simply had to put another zero to the price.
If I had the chance to buy a second original that would work for me like my No.1 – I would do it and would be more than happy to pay 20.000 € for it.
From my point of view, the Vintage Signature has become what I wanted it to be:
I played my „beloved 61 strat™“ over 25 years and modified it to my demands. During all those years it became a true friend and an important part of my tone.
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Now I was really interested to make this guitar a dignified No.2 and we started a dialogue concerning changes and improvements. In the meantime, Trevor and Dennis made progress with their brand/label Vintage with „distressed look instruments“.