This is #12 – a 2010 Fender Stratacoustic.
Spruce top, thinline fibreglass body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard.
An electro-acoustic with a difference, this gat combines a strat-style neck with a strat-shaped body made of fibreglass. This is the “improved” version, with a Fender-branded 3-band preamp with built-in tuner (that cleverly mutes the output when activated, allowing you to tune silently).
After reading reviews of the earlier models (this guitar was first introduced in 2000) I suspect the improvements include extra weight in the body to counteract the neck-heaviness. This gat feels heavier than it looks, heavier than some small-body acoustics.
The neck looks like a strat’s but since I don’t have one to compare it to I can’t say if it is the real thing. It’s a little narrow, especially on the high-E side, so you have to be careful with bends or you’ll end up going over the edge.
The action was not as high as I had expected from reading the nightmare reviews on the interwebs – maybe that’s another one of the improvements. However I removed the bridge and gave it a light sanding down and now it’s almost comparable to an electric’s action. Low strings are still a bit high so it’s back to the sanding block shortly!
How does it sound? Well when I first played it I laughed. It had an almost comical sound, more akin to a ukulele than a guitar. This makes my shallow-bowl Ovation sound like a dreadnought! However after replacing the strings (some very tarnished D’addarios) with a fresh set of Martin 80/20s it sounded much better. A fair amount of resonance in the body but not a lot of the natural warmth of real wood, despite the spruce top.
Plugged in it has a nice even sound, not brittle like a DI’d electro-acoustic. The mid eq gives a nice range of sounds from a fat dobro/banjo tone to a thin and crispy tone which I quite prefer. Bass eq adds weight without going overboard – I guess you can’t get too much bass from 0.46’s anyway! The treble eq is a bit too harsh for my liking, but might come in handy when playing through larger speakers.