Yes, Squier does, but the kicker is that they're not available IN the USA. One would have to buy a Fiesta Red/Indian laurel from abroad and pay extra to have it shipped into the USA.
Paul compares 4 Fiesta Red Strats, from $400 to $60K
- Thread starter DougMen
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Yes, Squier does, but the kicker is that they're not available IN the USA. One would have to buy a Fiesta Red/Indian laurel from abroad and pay extra to have it shipped into the USA.
Mike Rutherford has recently been doing it the "poor man" way too.
He dashed down to the shops and snatched up a couple of Squier Bullet Strats before lockdown confined him to his hotel, and found a keeper...
As his guitar tech tells it: "Mike has got so many other wonderful Strats, but he also loves using these Indonesian-made Squier Bullet Stratocasters. He can’t put the Sonic Grey one down. It’s the first guitar he wants to play every day and he uses it for some big songs in the Genesis set including No Son of Mine and Mama."
I'm pretty sure when Mike says about his Squier "It's got a life to it" he's talking about how lively it feels under his fingers; in the same way as @Lanaka so aptly describes "Feel", rather than how it was sounding through his 3 watt lockdown amp.
Arena-rocking Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford has been using $200 Squier Bullet Strats onstage
"I just love it," Rutherford says of the budget Strat. "It's got a life to it. It's a little bit lighter than some and it's got a slightly smaller neck which helps my aging fingers"www.guitarworld.com
Actually, Mr. Rutherford is the reason why I took the plunge to buy a few Bullets. I bought two FSR Bullets, one Strat and one Tele in Red Sparkles. New. I like them. Even tho I do prefer full thickness bodies, …on guitars! 😋
DougMen
Squier-Axpert
It isn't the look of PF I dislike, it's the hard (perhaps lack of pores) feeling under my fingers that actually hurts after about a half hour. I was scratching my head trying to figure out what fretboard wood FR was, lol.
Yeah, I understand that. First time I saw a pau ferro fretboard, not knowing what it was, I thought WTF is Fender doing using plastic fretboards??! 😆
DougMen
Squier-Axpert
Before it replaced RW on Mexican Fenders, and thus became frowned upon, it was an upmarket wood, like Ebony is, and first appeared on the SRV signature Strat.
In a perfect world a nice uniform dark piece of RW will always sound best, but it doesn't always work that way in the real world. Sometimes a chocolate colored piece of RW sounds better than a dark ebony colored one. Unless you're just a collector and don't play your guitars, then you would logically pick what sounds best to you, even if it doesn't look as good. I actually like highly figured wood, even on fretboards. Some striped ebony boards look awesome. I don't care for those that are half dark and half white, or almost all dark with one weird white streak, but if they were streaked dark and white throughout, I think that would look cool. A Cocobolo board would look awesome, IMO. I have no objection to dyeing those ugly pieces to make them look nicer, which I have a sneaky suspicion is true of many cheap Asian guitars. Why do all those lesser brand Chinese Strats have perfect dark RW boards? I think Fender/Squier does the same with IL, because it's getting better looking all the time, compared to what it looked like when first used on Squiers. There's a small chip on the edge of the fretboard on my Squier LPB Bullet Tele, and guess what? The wood underneath is maple colored, lol. Here it is. You can see it halfway between the two frets, right on the edge just before the finished edge of the fretboard starts. See how white it is? It's very blurry because I had to crop and zoom it so much to be really visible, and you can also see the light streaks in the wood on the poly finished/covered part of the fretboard edge between the frets and the maple. But, the unfinished part of the board where your fingers go is all uniformly dark, for the most part, except the pores in the grain, which also look white. You don't really normally see or notice that without a microscope or a macro lens.
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That's ok, you completely ignored me right back.
I don't care much how it sounds either acoustically OR electrically in the store. I care how it FEELS. If it doesn't feel right, I can't make it play right no matter what I do to the sound. I don't need to plug anything in to feel the guitar. I've never had a guitar that feels good that couldn't make better with new pickups and electrics if the ones in it aren't cutting it. I've had plenty of guitars that feel like crap and always feel like crap no matter what I put in it or plug it into.
It gotta Feel right FIRST before I consider how it Sounds. That is always first and foremost because if it doesn't Feel right I won't pick it up to play and will always reach for another guitar to play. In that case, no sense me getting that first guitar.
It's way easier to make a guitar Sound right to me than to make a guitar Feel right to me. Sound is affected by the combination of pickups and other electronic components which are easy peasy to change. Feel is affected by the quality of wood and build quality, and to a lesser extent, quality of hardwares. The hardwares is the easy part of the equation, BUT fixing a bad neck or a body flaw is much more difficult and often is outta the scope of my capabilities (time, skill and/or financial wise).
I'd rather deal with a bad Sounding guitar than a bad Feeling guitar. I can deal with electronics. I can't deal as well with any wood work more complicated than swapping necks/bodies.
It's way easier to make a guitar Sound right to me than to make a guitar Feel right to me. Sound is affected by the combination of pickups and other electronic components which are easy peasy to change. Feel is affected by the quality of wood and build quality, and to a lesser extent, quality of hardwares. The hardwares is the easy part of the equation, BUT fixing a bad neck or a body flaw is much more difficult and often is outta the scope of my capabilities (time, skill and/or financial wise).
I'd rather deal with a bad Sounding guitar than a bad Feeling guitar. I can deal with electronics. I can't deal as well with any wood work more complicated than swapping necks/bodies.
