GuitarBizarre

Stratocasters -

The good -
The tone CAN be pretty good.
Non-glossy necks are easier to play.
Double cutaway
Look cool.

The BAD:

No tilt on the headstock means there isn't enough pressure to keep strings on the nut without strings trees, which put extra pressure on the strings after the nut to give the strings the proper angle. This reduces sustain and also leads to tuning issues as the strings bind on the trees.

The necks are bolted to the body in a pocket routed completely flat, with no angle. This reduces sustain and thins out the tone because to get a proper bridge to neck angle the neck must be shimmed and this makes the wood to wood contact much less. It also results in a thin tone due to the way the tension of the strings + the bridge angle wants to pull the neck in a slightly different direction to the one the pocket would, and vibrations dont transfer properly between neck and body because of this. (Want proof? The new player special jaguars have an increased neck pocket angle for exactly this reason.)

The neck plate block is HUGE and gets in the way all the time.

The cutaway isnt deep enough to afford even reasonable access to the higher frets.

The Radius of the fretboard is WAY too tight and means big bends often choke out with low action. Especially on early strats with the 7.25 inch radius vs the 9.75 modern radius, which is still too tight tbh, seeing as almost every other manufacturer uses at least a 12 inch radius.

The front routed controls aren't firmly mounted and contribute to feedback, even though the single coils already feedback a lot.

Lots of strats before the most recent wave of QC used a 'swimming pool' pickup route that removed a whole ****load of tonewood from the body.

The bridge design is 6 screw vintage and it SUCKS. it locks at neither end, has more friction points than even a simple non locking design would need, the sustain block is too small, the bridge is mounted in the body with nothing more than wood screws. etc. oh, and the saddles are stamped steel, reducing the mass and weakening the bridge string body connection.

The jack is hideously placed and inconvenient, always pulls out etc.

The whole design is ridiculous. Only slightly more advanced than the tele, which pretty much exists only for the sake of being easily mass produced, as eveyone knows.






Oh, and ibanez guitars are great for a bunch of things. The best Jazzbox I've ever played was an ibanez, and thats hardly 'heavy'

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