Mahogany Fender Stratocaster from China

As you probably know, Fender expanded their factories around the word. After making guitars in Mexico since years, they decided to take benefit of the cheap and high-quality labor from Chinese guitar makers. Who can blame them? Every big brand and smaller ones are doing the same. It’s a pity for local workers in so-called rich countries but without cheap labor, no one could afford the lifestyle we have. Especially in the days of today.

… Enough 101 philosophy.

The Fender Stratocaster modern player HSH model is a good and extremely affordable guitar. It’s even cheaper than Mexican Stratocasters, and personally I prefer them.

As I say in the video, I changed tuners and vibrato. The tuners especially were of mediocre quality. I don’t think you can get any cheaper than that. After searching online for guitar parts, I could find them on a Chinese e-commerce site for the price of five dollars, shipping included. No wonder they are bad.

The vibrato was as usual on cheap Fenders. I know that the American Deluxe model has a good vibrato, but all the Stratocaster I’ve tried own the same crappy and untunable whammy bar. So it’s better to customize a cheap guitar than a dear one.

I bought Sperzel auto locking tuners and a Wilkinson vibrato. It was extremely easy to install. It took me less than an hour to do both. The longest task was to fine tune the vibrato. But after an hour or two, I managed to set it up floating. And now, despite the lack of routing such as the one you have with Floyd Rose vibrato, the tuning is stable. I’ll do a video on how to set a Wilkinson floating soon. It works with a regular Fender Whammy bar too. I’m working on many different projects now, but I’ll find time to craft it asap.

The guitar body is made out of Mahogany. Neck is Maple with a Rosewood fingerboard. It sports 22 jumbo frets with a vintage finish.

The modern player Stratocaster has a warm sound with a lot of sustain, due to the mahogany body combined with humbucker pickups. But you still get the characteristic Stratocaster sound of the second and fourth position pickup selection. This guitar is extremely versatile. You can play every type of music with it. From blues to rock to jazz… Name it! The clean sound from the neck pickup is especially smooth and warm and allows you to play jazzy stuff or to have a bluesy sound when adding crunch sound to it.

Listen to the Fender Stratocaster modern player HSH in action

Near the end of the video, I mentioned two compositions of mine featuring that guitar. If you want to listen to them, please follow this link. It regroups by tag all the songs In which I used the modern player Stratocaster.

Both songs are extremely different one from another. “Encore“, in 5/4, is a progressive rock type of music where I used heavy distorted sound and abuse of vibrato. While “Modern Player ‘s Trip“, composed in honor of this guitar, is much smoother and focus more on crunch sound with various pickup settings.

In the coming months I’m going to add more compositions, but as of today, only two songs feature that guitar prominently.

Fender Stratocaster modern player details

• mahogany body
• maple neck C-shape
• rosewood fretboard
• 22 medium frets
• scale 648mm
• nut width 42mm
• pickups 2x modern player humbucker (neck and bridge) and 1x modern player single coil (middle)
• 5 way switch
• vintage style tuners
• 2 point synchronized tremolo
• 3 ply black pickguard

If you want to customize the Stratocaster the same way as I did, take a look at those links to get the same auto blocking keys and vibrato.

At Thomann

Vibrato
[adrotate group=”12″]Tuners
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At eBay

Recommended links to Get the Fender Stratocaster modern players model

At Thomann

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At eBay

 Photo & Video: Hervé Senni

Fender Stratocaster Modern Player HSH Tests – Chinese Stratocaster Model

This post is also available in: French