Hell, the way my saddles are set up it makes palm muting a dream. Some good samaritin decided to angle the saddles when I was having the nut replaced and damn, do I want to shake their hand for such a wonderfully quirky setup. It's a bit hard to explain but, the screws are angled foward a bit so you can have the extra space to screw them in and not have them popping out of the saddle. Ashtray wise, it's never really gotten in the way, hell I mean the saddles are a bit higher than the edges of the ashtray itself.

Fender Strats are the guitar IMO.

The boring guitar.

Its like the Honda Civic. Boring plain, but fun as hell to trick out.

I have to go with Martin & Co. for acoustic, Gibson for electric. Those are loose favorites though, each guitar has such unique sound.

I was actually just needlessly bashing it. I used to own a strat and there fantastic and well playing iconic guitars.

I constantly get people that don't play guitar to tell me how much I suck for not getting a strat... I don't like them I don't give a fuck who has played them. I like playing guitar because it's fun, not because I want to be a fucking rockstar. Praise deserves to go towards the telecaster as it has been around for 60 years and despite how many variations there are you can still get a good old tele for cheap.

and i'll cut off my balls with rusty scissors before giving up my strat hehehe

Fenders are awesome, really easy to play. But if you're into heavy stuff Ibanez guitars are perfect.

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'

Ibanez make amazing hollow/semi-hollowbody guitars. I think a lot of people tend to forget that. Do they make an enclosed/chambered hollowbody too?