4.52am Issue: 008 13th November 2016

"Synchronised Tremolo' or "Comfort
Contours" bit on Fenders.
This particular guitar is the 'Sunset Strip'
because that’s where the faux back story of
this one places it, one of the first of the
'Superstrats' back before you could just go
and buy a fully loaded Kramer or Charvel,
something concocted on the workbench of
a guitar shop using bits from the Dimarzio
or Schecter catalouges.”
What was your motivation for building
this guitar?
“Ah well, you see the thing here is that I'm
a bit nostalgic and I like each guitar to
have an inspiration, a 'back story' if you
will.
This one takes me back to when me and all
my friends got our first electric guitars.
Generally it would've been a gift from your
parents, often from Argos, Currys or Dixons
so if you were lucky you'd get a Squier but
often as not you'd find yourself toting a
Marlin or a Hohner or a Sunn, Jeez do you
remember those ?
Anyway, you'd get your first guitar and it
was great but then the initial excitement
would wear off and you'd realise that the
thin plinky single coil sound of your plywood
Strat wasn’t quite what you needed for the
monster rock sounds you were after but you
were stuck with the guitar as there was no
way you could afford a 'real one'. But then
we would read Guitar World or some other
impossibly glamorous looking US guitar mag
(that was never the same physical size as
the UK ones) and we'd see stuff about EVH
and the like who were all modding guitars to
get what they wanted out of them and it
was like a light coming on. Except we didn’t
have access to stuff in the UK in the same
way so there were a whole raft of friend’s