It’s not really common that a new product line from a well established manufacturer gets the full tar and feather treatment in the first week. Doing so must take really special effort to acheive and if you follow the guitar industry pundits that do not depend on Fender for advertising dollars or payoffs (magazines and influencers), the general word being heard is CRAP.

Thus as I am not paid or sponsored by anybody, I worked with the fine people at The Arts Music Store to get a Fender Standard Stratocaster for a proper review. Over the period of time this is what I have learned about the line. Please understand that thus far, I have only had one Standard Stratocaster for an extended period, however I have played other Fender Standard instruments for very short periods, and the only word that describes the experiences is “INCONSISTENT” which means some okay, some unplayable, but none have excited me.

Do expect whichever dealer you use to check any guitar that you choose to purchase at that time, but it is typically unrealistic for any store to do a setup on every guitar as it comes out of the box.

Overview

My initial exposure to the Fender Standard Stratocaster was that it looked pretty decent with a good quality finishing job, that the neck did not feel like any production series Fender that I have ever played and that it weighed a ton. Hardly inspirational. Others beside it varied. One was much better right off the bat, and the other was in my mind, requiring of professional work to make it playable by anyone without the finger strength of the Hulk. However Hulk arm strength was required for all of them. I find the weight reminiscent of 1970’s Gibson Les Pauls when they were two slabs of mahogany with a piece of iron in the middle weighing in regularly at well over ten pounds. The Standard Stratocaster in hand is not that bad, but is much heavier than any Player II Stratocaster or any of the Squier Stratocaster models. If you were to play a two hour gig wearing this, your back would have words with you.

The body wood is poplar. Fender conveniently does not specify WHICH poplar is used as there are many poplar variants. Having seen a transparent finish on one instrument it’s pretty ugly and readily includes strange colours due to mineral contamination that is common in poplars. There is a sunburst version available. Pick a solid colour. Poplar is a notoriously soft wood and damages easily. Given the enormous weight of the guitars, I am surmising that this is a series of glued up pieces of Yellow Poplar which weighs in at 29 punds per cubic foot.. For comparison a cubic foot of red oak which everyone knows to be super heavy is 43 pounds. However oak is very hard and poplar is very saft. I believe that Phil McKnight found that the body of his sample was a four piece unit. Poplar tends to fur up when being prepped for finish requiring extra sanding and heavier finish coats.

The headstock is the Fender small Stratocaster headstock with a Fender logo that immediately reminded me of working with Letraset rub on letters back in the 1970s. It says Fender and I expect that was the only goal. To me it looks like it was slapped on at the last minute. The tuners feel really cheap, about what you find on a $200 Squier Affinity. I would rate the tuners a 2 out of 5. The headstock is finished in a high gloss polyurethane that reminds me of the table surface at the old Crock and Block restaurant in Mississuga Ontario. Thick and shiny.

The neck and fingerboard on my evaluation unit is maple. A maple fingerboard is glued to a maple neck. Thus there is no skunk stripe on the back of the neck, which tells us that the neck has a slot cut for the truss rod and the fingerboard is glued on top. No concerns with that design at all, and fortunately the truss rod is adjustable at the headstock and the neck doesn’t have to come off for adjustment. This is a very good thing because every guitar I tried had too much relief in the neck. The guitar does come with the appropriate truss rod wrench. The fingerboard has a gloss finish and the back of the neck is satin. It’s good work but the neck carve is definitely not the standard Fender Modern C.. It feels odd to me moving to it from either Mexico or American built Strat. The fretboard edges on this instrument have a subtle roll, but the one beside it did not. Rolled edges are comfortable and the neck thus feels broken in. The fretwork is good, and while there was no big fret sprout, if it were mine, I would be spending time on it. It won’t carve up your hands like a certain Jackson that I reviewed. I would give it a 3.5 out of five. The frets are not well polished and bends feel gritty in places, although to be fair to the fret people that could be due to the rusty barbed wire that Fender is using for strings. If the entire set cost more than a dime, they got ripped off. The nut is white micarta and to be clear, is poorly cut, offering slots that are too deep, and slots that are not deep enough. Neither to the point of being unplayable, but not good either. I would rate the nut work as poor, a 2 out of 5. For those curious, micarta is an amalgam of linen, paper, canvas, fibreglass, some or all plus other stuff in a plastic overmold. As much like bone as Richlite is like wood, meaning not at all.

The paint finish on my eval guitar is excellent, definitely a 5 out of 5 in the CANDY COLA red paint. The work on a white model was also good, but the paint and bodywork on a blue model was at best a 3 out of 5. Inconsistent.

The strap lugs hold a strap. I find them too small to suit me, but I expect most folks would be ok although I would replace them if the guitar was going to be played by someone who moves around a lot while playing. The scratchplate is fine. It’s white plastic. The same with the control knobs. They don’t have the great feel of the knobs on a Fender Ultra or Ultra II Stratocaster but they are good enough to be going on with. The 5 way switch is very positive and is an actual real switch as opposed to a PC board type. This is a very good thing. The pots are Alphas and while they work, they feel cheap and are not without some noise. The output jack feels sloppy and when exposed it is about as cheap a jack as one could find. I would expect it to fail in reasonably short order in the hands of an enthusiastic player. It also crackles, could be a bad solder connection.

Now the pickups. They are laid out so when the switch is in positions 2 and 4 the pair become hum cancelling. They are not particularly noisy in any position but are very low output, what I would expect from low wind traditional magnet pickups. Except they aren’t. The pickups have metal pole pieces but the field is created by a pair of small ceramic bar magnets on either side of the pole pieces. Their resistance and impedance is very low and they are definitely low output. To my ear, they sound weak and tinny, unusable in most all situations without a solid clean boost at minimum. You can put them through a fuzz of course and then they sound fuzzy but may not drive the fuzz in the manner that you expect. Think of regular single coils at 5 or 6. The pickups are the number one contributor to what has become by DO NOT RECOMMEND final rating.

The bridge is a two post Fender style vibrato bridge. This is sadly a very cheap clone of the Fender bridge on the Stratocaster Ultra. The arm has a weird bend in it and it will hit the body if pointed towards the tail. The bridge plate arrived with a pretty significant float set and the instrument goes out of tune if you look at it funny. Stretching in the strings sadly made no real difference (they are crap strings after all) but if you decked the bridge plate you might get more tuning stability while giving up the ability to bend up using the arm. The arm is of the screw in type with a tiny spring that gets lost readily to provide tension so you don’t have to screw the arm in tight. Many reviewers make a big deal that the individual block style saddles are satin finished and not gloss like on higher end guitars. It looks marginally goofy but no one should care about that. They should care that the saddles need a good polishing in the string tracks as they drag.

Specifications

I screen captured the specifications directly from Fender’s web site. The Fender site is notoriously unreliable. Today it could not decide if I was in Canada or Monaco,

With all respect to Fender, there is nothing unique, special or particularly enthusing about this guitar’s specs. It is similar to most other very inexpensive guitars using low end woods and materials. Except it isn’t inexpensive.

Playing the Standard Stratocaster

The first thing I will say is that it doesn’t feel like any of my Stratocasters. The neck carve is too shallow. The 9.5” radius does not fret out with the .009-.042 factory wires but when you get to the higher frets on the high strings, sustain is non-existent. The frets need a really good polishing, I’ve felt better on China built instruments that sell for less than half the Fender price and they were also stainless steel. Fender does not say what they are using for fret wire other than it is medium jumbo. The pots are ok, but need some working in to be less gritty. The bridge is ok if you take it down to the deck, otherwise a reasonable touch of the vibrato arm and the whole guitar goes out of tune consistently, down as much as a full step. The springs are not set too soft, the bridge plate just doesn’t return to zero properly, so if a knife edge, it’s a butter knife. The tuning machines have a lot of lash in them from my perspective. They feel cheap. I would not recommend buying this guitar and then replacing the crappy components because you would just be pouring more money into an already overpriced instrument that you would never get the full benefit from.

As for the sound of the pickups, sound appreciation is subjective. What I dislike, you may love and we will both be correct for ourselves. However with upwards of 300 instruments owned and reviewed, it is my determination that the pickups in this guitar suck. I could replace them with the original pickups from my 25 year old Mexican Strat and they would sound better. I am not a fan of the pots and hate the complete lack of quality in the output jack. Into a clean amp is sounds thin and whiny. To get anything approaching decent, it needs compression, a hefty clean boost and some overdrive so it doesn’t sound like it’s been castrated.

Yuck.

Example Tones

To make the four short samples, I plugged the Fender Standard Stratocaster into one of my most used Quad Cortex profiles. Basically the amp, cab and spring reverb. I must be honest. i did not like it. So I added a Universal Audio 1176 compressor set at 8:1 and a clean boost averaging +9 dB. That was as close to a decent clean as I could get. I rolled the bass back a bit, and slightly increased the mids and trebles as the guitar sounded a bit swampy with everything at noon. The first sample is just a standard chord played at each of the five pickup positions with volume and both knobs up full. The second is a short single note riff recorded in position 4 with neck and middle pickups and their shared tone rolled off to 6. The third is the bridge pickup with volume and tone at ten and incorporating Neural’s excellent Klon Centaur capture. The fourth is the middle pickup without the Klon but adding in a BOSS CE2W chorus and Neural’s own Rotary pedal and Tape Delay. To avoid winning a LAME award, I did master everything with my Abbey Road Glue and Punch Mastering configuration which made things better. I think that the fourth sample is the best sounding and even then I'm not overly enamoured. I do not think that the pickups sound any better than the ones in an Affinity Stratocaster.

Wrapping Up

I do not recommend this guitar or the Standard Telecaster. Both are way overpriced and seriously under deliver. Save $240 and buy a Squier (by Fender!) Classic Vibe that suits you. You will get a better built guitar, with better components that plays better, sounds better and costs a lot less. You do give up the Fender sticker of course, but you aren’t that shallow and foolish are you?

I am aware that there are folks who believe that I am a Fender hater. Sure, that’s why I own so many and have kept those for decades. I think that the Fender Ultra IIs are great, albeit overpriced for what you get. The Player II series are killer guitars, better in my mind than all the US built flavours other than the Ultra IIs. I also highly recommend the Classic Vibe series from Squier. I have yet to play one that wasn’t really really good, and even though some people piss on the pickups, they are better than what is in the Fender Standards, and one would save so much money, you could replace those still very good pickups with something stellar.

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