![]() What followed was years worth of wrestling with it, modding it and trying to get the best out of the instrument. Although the details of which played no part in my purchase, they should have, as later I became slightly dissilusioned with the way the guitar played. Surprisingly, David used an ’83 reissue with a 7.25" radius with “vintage style frets” - which are quite small by today’s standards. Know what you’re buying- checking the detail So something like Gilmour’s Red Strat really appealed to me.īut the thing I learned about guitars in general, long after I bought my red Strat in 2013 was that fretboard’s had a radius and that I should care about it and the fret size. Like many young and naive guitarists, although by this point I was 16 years into my guitar journey, my focus when shopping for guitars was on the tone I wanted and the colour or aesthetic. Gilmour had active EMG pickups in his but I knew that I wanted passive pickups and I aimed for the sound of his Black Strat but with the Red Strat aesthetic.ĭavid Gilmour’s Red Strat - photograph taken by me at the Pink Floyd Exhibition in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, October 2017. Gilmour’s Red Strat was his main guitar for 20 years and featured heavily on the last three studio albums ( including The Endless River). I picked my favourite, whacked it on the drip* and walked out a very happy man, with a new guitar and a wonderful memory. I plugged into a Fender Blues Deluxe and was remarkably surprised by how different the two guitars felt and sounded. ![]() There were two identical looking guitars in the shop that I wanted to try, both Candy Apple Red but the one I walked out with had a darker lacquered maple neck, which I was fond of. She’s now my wife of nearly 4 years and like many wives of guitarists, she rolls her eyes every time I mention guitars! Although, she’s very tolerant and supportive. It was a special day for me because it was the first guitar I’d bought with my girlfriend, it was the first time she’d heard me play guitar and she was impressed, well, she said she was at the time. For selfish reasons, I decided that we should have a date day in Bristol, mainly because I had been hunting down what I thought would be my perfect Stratocaster and I’d found one online that showed stock in a shop in Bristol. It was summer of 2013 and I’d recently met a girl and we’d started out on the road of a new relationship. Soon after selling it, I contacted the buyer to say that if he ever wanted to sell it on, please get in contact and allow me the opportunity to buy it back. This was just one stepping stone in a long line of regrets that have come back to bite me in my life as a guitarist, chasing the “latest and greatest” and that greener grass that sometimes doesn’t exist. I foolishly thought that I no longer needed the Fender around and proceeded to let it go. I sold it to him in the summer of 2017 because I wasn’t using it. Earlier this month, I was contacted by the current owner of my very first Strat, he wanted to know if I’d be open to the idea of buying it back.
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