MusicRadar

• Review

Anyone familiar with Eric Johnson will know that, apart from his magical touch on the guitar, he strives for the perfect tone.

Eric wants to evoke the smooth, singing voice of the violin in his lead passages and so hates sounds that are thin and spiky, preferring thick tones that fall from his guitar like liquid.

A true aficionado of vintage Strats, Johnson is someone who knows better than most how the world's favourite electric guitar could be 'improved'.

And with that in mind he got together with Fender and came up with this very retro-looking instrument. "They used my favourite Stratocaster," Eric tells us. "It's a 1957 sunburst with maple neck that I found in Florida when I was on tour a few years ago."

Overview

He stipulated an exceptionally lightweight, heavily contoured alder body finished in the thinnest nitro-cellulose lacquer.

Mated to this would be a quarter-sawn tinted maple neck with the smoothest transition between neck and headstock, armed with 21 medium-jumbo frets and with a modern, 12-inch fingerboard radius.

Eric likes his Strats to be fitted with the full five springs but not 'blocked up' as with Eric Clapton's guitar. "All my guitars are like that," he confirms.

Not a fan of the tricky-to-negotiate Strat back-plate with its fiddly string-loading holes, Johnson decided it would be omitted from his signature guitar.

But there's more to it than that. "Actually the backplates are removed from all my guitars because I think they sound better with them off," he says.

Johnson wanted his Strat to look as 'normal' as possible. Due to his desire for a string-tree-free headstock, one millimetre or so has been skimmed from its front surface and staggered Gotoh tuners fitted.

"The reason I did this is because the guitar stays in tune better," explains Eric. "It was my idea to stagger the tuners, then Michael Braun at Fender made it work by skimming the face of the peghead to increase string angle over the nut."

Other personal features include a parchment-coloured, single-ply scratchplate, an authentic vibrato block - "It's closer to those used in the 1950s and 1960s; the holes are smaller and the string doesn't go in as deep" - and a discreet neck-plate bearing the guitarist's initials and the figure of Kokopelli, a Native American character symbolising the 'mischievous minstrel'.

But the most important weapon in the guitar's arsenal is its pickups and wiring. Eric worked with the Custom Shop to develop pickups that sounded both warm and hot, with a distinct vintage vibe that retained every ounce of tone possible.

Traditionally Strats don't have a tone control on the bridge pickup, leaving this often harsh-sounding single-coil as many people's least favourite selection. Johnson simply switched the tone pot from the middle pickup to the bridge, leaving the neck unit covered by its own tone control but the middle wired wide open.