Image: Fender You have a long-standing relationship with Seymour Duncan – this guitar is loaded with a newly designed set of your signature Clean Machine pickups. With this guitar there is no need for that.” “When you play a guitar long enough you learn to adjust to its nuances – to compensate even just a little bit as you learn your instrument.
This neck feels faster and little more effortless no matter where my wrist positioning is. I play a bunch of weird chord shapes and stretches, doublestops, all over the fretboard. The neck on this guitar is an ultra-modern D shape and the compound fretboard radius goes from 10 to 14 inches, a little more like the Ultra, and also there’s a contoured heel. “Fender has the Modern C and Modern D shapes and the Highway One feels to me like it’s in-between those two. Image: Fender Neck carve is an extremely personal choice. I’m not sure that most people will really notice but when I went out and tried every Strat I could lay my hands on within a 10-mile radius of where I live – I found that for my style of playing and what feels comfortable to me this option just suited me better.” “The body shape is more contoured and technically it’s something like three per cent smaller than usual. Also it looks great through the transparent finish. We tried a bunch of different things – I like the feel and the weight of alder. “I wanted to pay homage to my blue Strat so we kept the Sapphire Blue nitrocellulose satin finish and the 22-fret neck with the Rosewood fingerboard like you’d see on a Highway One or an Ultra model and that’s my preference. When we were developing this guitar Fender gave me basically a blank menu with every single spec choice possible and said, ‘What do you want? Fill in everything – there’s options for it all!’ That’s just incredible right? To me the Stratocaster is the most iconic electric guitar and there are so many subtle nuances in each model. “It’s true, there are so many options with the Stratocaster – you go to the store and you see 50 of them on the wall and the average person might think they’re all the same, just different colours.