Fender Stratocaster 1962 Reissue (Fender Stratocasters in general)

Member Name: richard_richard

Product:	Fender Stratocasters in general
Date:	09/12/04 (10120 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great neck, Value for money, Good build quality

Disadvantages: Low output pickups, Not suited for heavier styles

Introduction
I own a Fender Stratocaster 1962 reissue guitar that I purchased way back in 1989. This guitar was manufactured in Japan at some point during 1988.

This guitar is something that I am pretty fond of, what with it being my first “proper” guitar, and at the time taking me the best part of a year to save up for!

I purchased this guitar from Peter Cook’s music shop in London and paid the sum of £299. Try buying a guitar made in Japan for that sort of money these days and you will struggle! Most low to medium price guitars are now made in India, China or Taiwan. It seems quite ironic to me that Japan has now become too expensive to manufacture lower priced guitars in!



Specifications
This guitar is based on the design of the 1962 Stratocaster. Therefore it has features common to Fender Strats of that era.

These include:

1962 neck profile
Thin fretwire
Body contouring based on the 1962 model Stratocaster
Maple neck
Rosewood fretboard
“Kluson” style tuners
3 vintage voiced single coil pickups
Vintage style tremolo
3 ply scratch plate
“Candy apple red” metallic finish


Stratocasters from this period were made with a one or two piece alder or ash body, but this reissue features a basswood body, probably made from three pieces, to keep costs down. However, the neck is made from a decent piece of maple and features a nice piece of rosewood for the fingerboard.

The guitar features 3 single coil pickups wired to the standard Stratocaster controls of one volume control, two tone controls and a five way pickup selector switch.

As an aside, there is quite an interesting story told about when the first of these Japanese made vintage re-issue Stratocasters were taken to the American Fender factory (where the originals were made in the 1960’s). They caused quite a stir. The Americans were shocked to realise that their Japanese subsidiary company were making more accurate reissue versions that the ones made in the American factory!



In Use
This guitar’s main strength is its neck. In this model, the Japanese did a great job in replicating the comfortable feel and shape of a 1962 Stratocaster’s guitar neck.

The headstock of the guitar bears the Fender name, written in the vintage “spaghetti” style script. It also features a label saying “original contour body”, obviously this is a feature taken from the original model.

The frets on this guitar are well seated, and the back of the neck is shaped into a very comfortable “C” shape. As this guitar has many years of use, the edges of the fingerboard have become nicely smoothed off. This makes playing the guitar an even more comfortable experience. The frets on the guitar neck are quite thin, but this does not hinder different playing styles.

Due to the vintage style nature of the neck, the action of the guitar (how close the strings are to the fingerboard) can only really be set at a medium or high level. Personally I don’t find this a problem, but some players who like a very low action may struggle with this type of guitar neck.

The body wood, being made of basswood, is quite soft and so will pick up knocks and bangs quite easily. If you do come across one of these guitars in decent condition my advice is to keep it in a case out of harm’s way. It seems the slightest bump can cause a dent in your treasured instrument!

The pickups on this guitar it has to be said are not the highest output and the treble is quite prominent, especially on the bridge pickup. For pop and funk styles they are well suited, but if you play heavier styles of music, they are not quite so good. Due to this weakness in sound, my particular model has been customised with a PRS humbucker at the bridge and a Seymour Duncan single coil in the middle pickup position.

The five way selector switch is also worth keeping an eye on, as the Japanese electronics were quite prone to picking up dust. This can cause crackling sounds when switching between pickups. It is well worth keeping this clean with an electrical switch cleaning product. I have actually replaced the five way switch on my guitar with an American Switchcraft model, which has worked reliably for many years.

Other electronics on the guitar, such as the volume and tone controls work well and I have not experienced any problems with these over the years.

This guitar features a vintage style tremolo system. This allows you to add shimmers and slight pitch dips and raises to your guitar playing. However, if too much abuse is applied it can knock your guitar out of tune, as these systems were never designed for very aggressive tremolo styles. (Jimi Hendrix used to be very aggressive with his Strat’s tremolo, but then ended up having to re-tune his guitar at the end of every song, so be careful!)

The tuners on the guitar are copies of the vintage “Kluson” type of machine head. These copies are certainly adequate to keep the guitar in tune. The tuners on my guitar have performed reliably in the 15 years that I have owned the instrument, so no complaints to report here.

The metallic finish is applied well to the body of the guitar. My reissue features a “Candy Apple Red” finish, which if you think of the colour of a Toffee Apple, you’ll be pretty close. (I’m guessing that Candy Apple is what Americans call a Toffee Apple?) The finish is created by first spraying a metallic gold finish to the body and then covering this with a see-through layer of red paint, to cause the sparkling “Candy Apple” effect.



Conclusion
OK, so this isn’t really a perfect copy of an original 1962 Stratocaster. The pickups are a bit too thin, the body wood is the wrong type and the five way switch isn’t the greatest quality. Then again, the neck on the guitar is wonderful, the finish is very well applied and the whole package is built to last for decades!

I would recommend buying one of these reissues if you come across one second hand. Although they were built to a cost, they represented fantastic value for money and would rival or surpass pretty much any lower cost guitars built in the Far East today.

Thanks for reading!

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