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Fender describes the new Custom Deluxe Strat as being "designed for the working musician". What the company means by that is that its taken the vintage blueprint of this stalwart model and added some modern improvements – in the pickup, bridge, fret and tuner departments – to create instruments that at a casual glance look like regular Fender Stratocasters but which perform like highly-tuned thoroughbreds.

The Custom Deluxe Stratocaster comes in selected finishes that have been chosen for the woods used. All colours are available with rosewood fingerboards or lightly figured one-piece maple necks, but only two-colour sunburst and vintage cherry sunburst come with ash bodies.

"It's such a great tone that you hardly need any overdrive to make the notes sing out."

At around the two grand mark this guitar isn't what you'd call cheap, but we've become used to Anderson and PRS-type quality on even some regular production Fenders, so the relatively limited nature and that Custom Shop branding should appeal to the lucky folk able to afford it.

Custom Deluxe Strat

How strange it is that, even after all these years, and having seen hundreds of new Strats emerging from their cases, it's still a lovely sight to behold. There's just something about that shape, the curves and the fact that it looks incredible from any conceivable angle that gets every guitarist's pulse racing.

Our Custom Deluxe is the perfect combination of vintage white, mint green pickguard and dark rosewood fingerboard (so many people don't like the 'gingery' rosewood so often seen nowadays that Fender selects the darkest East Indian variety for these guitars).

Other plastic parts are aged white, adding to the 'new but not new' vibe. The Custom Deluxe also features the deep contoured forearm and belly scoop so beloved of vintage Strat lovers, and the perfectly applied thin-skin nitro-cellulose finish is buffed to a high gloss too, helping to accentuate the guitar's slinky lines. Relic-haters, these are for you!

The 'modern player' twists that Fender has built-in include the company's two-point floating vibrato, which has been around for some years and has proved a hassle-free successor to Leo's original. Its solid stainless steel saddles and rear block provide plenty of twang and sustain and its usability goes without saying, given that it's whammy abuser Jeff Beck's system of choice.

Tying in neatly with this is a set of Schaller locking tuners, staggered in height to obviate the need for a string tree and to aid tuning by not impeding the string's route across the headstock. The final nod to the 'modern' player is the 22-fret, 241mm (9.5-inch) radius fingerboard and taller Dunlop 6105 frets which provide a playground for string bending and vibrato – the Strat's perfect style partners.