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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 5:29 pm
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Bigsby wrote:
paris wrote:
There used to be a M Black, but was dropped. I lind of wished that Fender had produced more color choices for this guitar.

Also, though I like maple neck fret boards, I would liked to have been able to get the SSS with a rosewood fretboard.

Funnily enough, I just found myself in the same situation - but reversed. I was interested in getting an HSS, but really wanted the maple fretboard. It put me off ordering one for about a week. Currently, Andertons in the UK are selling off the last of these models at roughly a third off - they have all four versions including the black. This morning I noticed the stock of the blue SSS was down to 10, so I decided to jump! I should be receiving a mystic ice blue Deluxe Plus tomorrow. :D Can't wait!

I agree there was a lack of choice with this model, and I don't think the metallic sunbursts worked very well. I'm not sure why this idea didn't go down that well, perhaps it's a combination of things. Certainly, guitarists have become a very conservative bunch, very different from the open & adventurous attitudes of the 60s & 70s.


I love the Anderton videos. I think you'll love the blue. I just played mine today. The Blender card gives you the David Gilmour mod, which can be very useful. If you go to "Accessories" on the Fender website, you can order different cards directly through Fender. I purchased the Phaser and Super Stacker cards.

I haven't found a real good use for the Phaser yet (it puts your pickups out of phase), but Super Stacker is awesome. It puts your puckups in parallel and beefs them up a bit. Great for an overdriven sound. Good luck.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 9:00 pm
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My biggest complaint with both of the models talked about is that they limit the amount of control the owner has over changing the components. On the plus model, what choice do you have if you don't like the pickups.
On the current deluxe the limits are even tight, change the neck and the pickguard or mod a pick guard to fit the neck. IMHO, they are trying w/ both models to control to some extent the aftermarket folks from getting a piece of the Fender brand as easily as they have in the past. Not saying that either model is good or bad, as I haven't played either.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Thu May 12, 2016 1:19 am
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sfceric64 wrote:
On the plus model, what choice do you have if you don't like the pickups.

Well, there are other Fender pickups available with solderless connections, such as the Texas Special. I guess the possibility of solderless pickups being available from third parties would depend on demand, and that would depend on how widely Fender adopt them. I've no idea how difficult it would be to modify existing pickups to solderless. In truth, it's about 30 years since I last changed a guitar's pickups - I'm more likely to change a guitar! (or pick).

It's an interesting paradox: Making a guitar much easier to modify has made it more difficult to modify. But the kind of modification offered here is much more suited to my needs.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Thu May 12, 2016 5:45 am
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Bigsby wrote:
sfceric64 wrote:
On the plus model, what choice do you have if you don't like the pickups.

Well, there are other Fender pickups available with solderless connections, such as the Texas Special. I guess the possibility of solderless pickups being available from third parties would depend on demand, and that would depend on how widely Fender adopt them. I've no idea how difficult it would be to modify existing pickups to solderless. In truth, it's about 30 years since I last changed a guitar's pickups - I'm more likely to change a guitar! (or pick).

It's an interesting paradox: Making a guitar much easier to modify has made it more difficult to modify. But the kind of modification offered here is much more suited to my needs.


Interesting - at this time last year Fender had Fat 50s and Fender Select pickups with the solderless connectors on their website as well as the Texas Specials - now only the Texas Specials are left. It looks like the Twin Head Modern and Twin Head Vintage humbuckers are solderless as well. I think this is telling us that Fender is moving on from the American Deluxe Strat Plus technology.

I suspect that you could add the connectors to regular pickups - you would just have to know the style of connector Fender is using.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 4:53 pm
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John C wrote:
Interesting - at this time last year Fender had Fat 50s and Fender Select pickups with the solderless connectors on their website as well as the Texas Specials - now only the Texas Specials are left. .


They seem to still have solderless Fat 50s, Select & Texas Special on the site:
http://intl.fender.com/en-GB/guitar-bas ... pickups-3/
http://intl.fender.com/en-GB/guitar-bas ... ups-white/
http://intl.fender.com/en-GB/guitar-bas ... pickups-3/

Though if they've not been adopted in other models, I guess they're likely to be discontinued before long.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 6:50 pm
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Bigsby wrote:
John C wrote:
Interesting - at this time last year Fender had Fat 50s and Fender Select pickups with the solderless connectors on their website as well as the Texas Specials - now only the Texas Specials are left. .


They seem to still have solderless Fat 50s, Select & Texas Special on the site:
http://intl.fender.com/en-GB/guitar-bas ... pickups-3/
http://intl.fender.com/en-GB/guitar-bas ... ups-white/
http://intl.fender.com/en-GB/guitar-bas ... pickups-3/

Though if they've not been adopted in other models, I guess they're likely to be discontinued before long.


The solderless Fat 50s and solderless Select pickups are no longer on the USA website, so I suspect they will come off the International website once the last sets at other distributors are sold off. These are the only solderless pickups on the USA website:

http://shop.fender.com/en-US/accessorie ... Solderless


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 1:11 am
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Ah! That explains it. I'll spend some time with the Noiseless before I decide, but I might just grab some Texas Specials so I have some choice. Looks like plenty of dealers have them in stock in the UK.

I guess it's likely that guitar production actually becomes more expensive with solderless pups & that's why Fender haven't introduced them on other models. They only made sense on this 'easy to mod' strat.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 6:43 am
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Bigsby wrote:
I guess it's likely that guitar production actually becomes more expensive with solderless pups & that's why Fender haven't introduced them on other models. They only made sense on this 'easy to mod' strat.

Fender Select also had solderless pickups.

The question is whether Fender landed on an actual standard (unlike Gibson who landed on two incompatible formats, and a marketing department calling both "QuickConnect", so the customer would not know unless actually seeing the pickup and cables).

Yeah, with extra headers on the pup and pots, the OEM production costs increase, although the guitar assembly price decreases (and service costs, if Fender were still doing service).
The problem, as I see it, is that Fender didn't start selling compatibility kits for existing models. When you make it really hard for customers to migrate, they won't.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 7:20 am
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The one American Deluxe Strat Plus that has been hanging around my closest Guitar Center is now on clearance - I think it's just because this one unit since it's getting some shop wear (no dings, but it's kind of dirty and the plastic is partially peeling off the pickguard.

They aren't on clearance on the GC website - has anyone else seen these go on a clearance or a blowout price yet?


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 8:30 am
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arth1 wrote:
... The problem, as I see it, is that Fender didn't start selling compatibility kits for existing models. When you make it really hard for customers to migrate, they won't.


Indeed so, but then is it a flawed concept in the first place? How frequently do you change PUP's that the convenience of a plug will be a consideration? Also, a single soldered joint must be better than two crimped joints and an interference joint. If you have enough practical nouse to remove a pick guard, and swap out a PUP, a bit of simple soldering isn't going to prove much of a challenge. An unnecessary solution to a non problem IMHO and (with regard to connection integrity) something worse than the original.

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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 9:29 am
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John Sims wrote:
Indeed so, but then is it a flawed concept in the first place? How frequently do you change PUP's that the convenience of a plug will be a consideration?


In a way, I think you're begging the question a little here. I think that if it were easier to change pickups (and to revert), more people would do it. So the frequency with which people change pickups that are hard to change shouldn't be used as an argument against pickups that are easy to change.

Ideally, I'd like to see an industry standard pickup connector, like the SATA connector is for hard drives. And a retrofit kit that can be mounted in the guitar cavity or on the pickguards of existing guitars. Being able to drop in a new pickup with no soldering would likely increase the sale of pickups.
Heck, it might even increase the sale of guitars, if people could ask to listen to a guitar in the store with different pickups, for the price of a set of strings.
But unless a standard emerges, and everybody keeps on doing it their own way (or in the case of Gibson, their own ways), there's little to no value.

As for durability of the connectors, or cross-talk due to proximity, I have few worries there. Hard drives are rattling around in millions of cars these days, without the connectors failing. And a multitude of extra ground connectors keeps cross-talk at bay. If anything fails, it's likely mechanical or solder joints. For signal loss, I would wager that there's overall more problems due to bad solder joints than well-designed connectors.
Of course, it has to be designed to meet the usage requirements, listening to the actual engineers more than the S&M guys.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 10:39 am
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John C wrote:
They aren't on clearance on the GC website - has anyone else seen these go on a clearance or a blowout price yet?

In the UK, Andertons sent out an e-mail on the 1st May with all four options reduced to £999 + a free card of choice (which is a bit over 1/3 off the total). I've been considering an up-market HSS Strat with a maple fretboard for a while - guess what combination of options does not exist on the Deluxe Strat Plus? That left me on the fence for a while, but I kept looking at their stock (+10 on each model) while I gave it some thought.

I was beginning to think the SSS in blue would be a good choice, but still slightly undecided when I saw that option was down to 10 in stock on Wednesday morning. I ordered one that day, but it arrived with a fault in the PC door, so it's being exchanged. The model sold out just after I secured the exchange, so they sold 10 in 3 days. The other 3 options are all still showing 10+ in stock - it seems they may have bought out the stock from Fender Europe at a clearance price, and I think they've grabbed all the cards too.

As for the solderless pups, I'm all for it - any soldering always got passed to my brother (an electronics expert long before his teens), so I never mastered the skill, & I've never wanted to learn on a guitar I cherish! I would certainly experiment with pick up swaps more if they were this simple. Of course, that's a personal take on it - no idea how popular solderless pickups might be if they were more widely available.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 11:12 am
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Bigsby wrote:
John C wrote:
They aren't on clearance on the GC website - has anyone else seen these go on a clearance or a blowout price yet?

In the UK, Andertons sent out an e-mail on the 1st May with all four options reduced to £999 + a free card of choice (which is a bit over 1/3 off the total). I've been considering an up-market HSS Strat with a maple fretboard for a while - guess what combination of options does not exist on the Deluxe Strat Plus? That left me on the fence for a while, but I kept looking at their stock (+10 on each model) while I gave it some thought.

I was beginning to think the SSS in blue would be a good choice, but still slightly undecided when I saw that option was down to 10 in stock on Wednesday morning. I ordered one that day, but it arrived with a fault in the PC door, so it's being exchanged. The model sold out just after I secured the exchange, so they sold 10 in 3 days. The other 3 options are all still showing 10+ in stock - it seems they may have bought out the stock from Fender Europe at a clearance price, and I think they've grabbed all the cards too.

As for the solderless pups, I'm all for it - any soldering always got passed to my brother (an electronics expert long before his teens), so I never mastered the skill, & I've never wanted to learn on a guitar I cherish! I would certainly experiment with pick up swaps more if they were this simple. Of course, that's a personal take on it - no idea how popular solderless pickups might be if they were more widely available.


I thought I had seen some posts about these being on sale in the UK; thanks for the confirmation and sorry the first one you got was defective. Hopefully the second one will be fine.

I'm terrible at soldering as well - however much I've tried I just never could quite get the hang of it and not leave a cold joint. When I was a kid Radio Shack here in the USA used to have these little electronics projects - crystal radios, things like that - that came in a box where the plastic bottom lid had holes in it to be used as the breadboard/turret hole card: you put the leads on the components through the holes and soldered them up on the bottom side. Never could get one of them to work, and a few times I wound up melting holes in the plastic box by accident. I'm not going to try that on a guitar. Here's what I'm talking about:

Image

I do tend to look at a guitar as a "whole"; I'm usually not one to chase tone by modding a guitar, I've tended to chase tone by finding a different one instead. I'm not sure which method empties out the gear fund quicker.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 11:20 am
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Bigsby wrote:
As for the solderless pups, I'm all for it - any soldering always got passed to my brother (an electronics expert long before his teens), so I never mastered the skill, & I've never wanted to learn on a guitar I cherish! I would certainly experiment with pick up swaps more if they were this simple. Of course, that's a personal take on it - no idea how popular solderless pickups might be if they were more widely available.

The good news is that there's precedence for standardization.
- We no longer have to buy amps that matches the guitar cabling or solder our own cables because the connectors were all different. TS cables won out, and gave us more freedom to choose amps and guitars.
- We no longer have to buy strings that are either pre-cut for a specific guitar model, or have to tie a knot on one end. Strings with a ball end in one end and an open and more than long enough lead in the other end became standard, and gave us more freedom to pick different strings.
- We no longer have to solder vacuum tubes to use them. The standardization of sockets gave us the means to easily both replace and change to different tubes.

Leo Fender was in part instrumental to some of the standardizations that happened. I think he would have welcomed a standard plug-in interface for pick-ups too. I'm not too sure whether the new Fender management think along those lines though - they may be more inclined to lock-ins and proprietary interfaces, which I think will hurt as much as universal standards will help.


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Post subject: Re: Test drove the new Stratocaster Elite
Posted: Sun May 15, 2016 1:23 pm
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hello forum, I am all into this topic lately, as I will hopefully get a strat soon. I see some endorsement of the Deluxe plus, but my interest lies in the hss models and I think that changes things a bit: for me it is the Shawbucker and alternating 250/500k volume pot that gives the Elite the upper hand over the Deluxe plus. The sound samples I listened to say the Elite could be way better with regard to humbucker performance. On the other hand there is the Mystic blue color sss Deluxe plus that may be the best looking strat I have lately seen. That super-stack personality card probably won't give it enough humbucker character for most users (who insist on getting a humbucker equipped guitar). Given that this guitar comes with serious electronics set up for an sss configuration, how would something like a single-sized humbucker perform on it? I have had some trouble getting a good sound from a bridge humbucker in a strat, so thats the main focus of my concerns. Thanks already for any helpful answers:)


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