Skip to main content
MusicRadar MusicRadar The No.1 website for musicians
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
  • Drums Week 25
  • Synths
  • Guitars
  • Guitar Pedals
  • Guitar Amps
  • Keyboards & Pianos
  • Controllers
  • Artist news
  • Drums
  • Software & Apps
  • More
    • Recording
    • DJ Gear
    • Acoustic Guitars
    • Bass Guitars
    • Tech
    • Tutorials
    • Reviews
    • Buying Guides
    • About Us
More
  • Santana on Beck
  • Friday, I'm in Love
  • Knopfler's 4-note secret
  • 95k+ free music samples
Don't miss these
Fender American Ultra Luxe 60s Stratocaster
Electric Guitars Fender Ultra Luxe Vintage '60s Stratocaster review
Dickey Betts [left] and Warren Haynes trade licks onstage with the Allman Brothers Band at the 1993 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Haynes's Strat would soon be stolen in New York.
Artists How Warren Haynes turned to Les Pauls after his favourite Strat was stolen
Fender Custom Shop Ariel Posen Stratocaster: Posen's new signature model was inspired by the Jazzmaster and has custom-wound AP-90 pickups. Check out those cupcake-style control knobs.
Artists Ariel Posen’s new Custom Shop signature Strat is A) stunning and B) inspired by a… Jazzmaster?
The Fender Richie Kotzen Stratocaster is made in Japan and features a contoured ash body with a stunning figured maple top, and comes with DiMarzio pickups and Gotoh tuners.
Artists Fender gives Richie Kotzen’s figured-maple topped MIJ signature Strat a global release
Kane Hibberd, the photographer behind the Scale exhibition in London, poses in front of his photographs – guitars features will include Kerry King of Slayer's BC Rich and Tom Morello's Arm The Homeless S-style.
Guitars Exhibition featuring life-sized photos of 100 legendary artists' guitars to open in London
Mark Speer of Khruangbin sits with his natural finish Fender Strat while Laura Lee holds her new signature Jazz Bass.
Artists Fender unveils DiMarzio-loaded Strat and Jazz Bass for Khruangbin’s Mark Speer and Laura Lee
Fender American Ultra Luxe Vintage Series
Guitars Fender mixes old-school mojo with 21st-century playability for the American Ultra Luxe Vintage range
A black-and-white image of Jimmy Page using a violin bow on his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard.
Guitars Bare Knuckle supremo Tim Mills reveals the tone secrets of Jimmy Page’s ‘Number One’ Les Paul
“The most talked-about guitar of the summer is coming to the Gibson Garage London”: P-90s, Light Aging from the Murphy Lab, handwritten Oasis lyrics… The Gibson Custom Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard has been unveiled and is here photographed in the Gibson Garage, with a variety of close-ups to show every detail.
Artists Gibson unveils Custom Noel Gallagher Les Paul: hand-signed, limited run – the ultimate Oasis guitar?
This composite image features Charlie Starr playing a TV Yellow Les Paul Junior on the left, while Metallica's Kirk Hammett plays his Greeny Les Paul Standard, and James Hetfield plays his his ESP Snakebyte.
Artists Blackberry Smoke’s Charlie Starr on that time he took Duane Allman’s '57 Goldtop to a Metallica show
Ray Cooper
Artists Percussionist Ray Cooper tells the story of his ‘lost’ live collaboration with Elton John
A Fender Player II Stratocaster and Telecaster on a white piece of wood with lots of holes in it
Electric Guitars Best electric guitars under $1,000/£1,000 in 2025: My top picks for players of all styles
John McLaughlin
Artists “I’m not a collector. I get guitars, but I give them away”: Why John McLaughlin regrets gifting a '67 Strat to Jeff Beck
John Fogerty wears a blue plaid shirt and plays his Fireglo 'Acme' Rickenbacker live onstage in 2022
Artists “Dumb idea to give a guitar away that meant so much to you”: John Fogerty explains why he let go of his iconic guitar
PRS 40th Anniversary McCarty SC56 McCarty Sunburst
Guitars PRS pays tribute to a legend of guitar design with the limited edition McCarty SC56
  1. Guitars
  2. Electric Guitars

We play a genuine '54 Fender Stratocaster

News
By Mick Taylor ( Guitarist ) published 7 May 2014

Up close and personal with a legend

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

We play a genuine '54 Fender Stratocaster

We play a genuine '54 Fender Stratocaster

60 DAYS OF STRAT: The guitar has always been totemic, to a degree. Many are the tales of wide-eyed hopefuls stood agog at music-shop windows, transfixed by a stringed conduit of wonder and possibility.

These days, that shop window is more likely to be on your computer screen than in your high street, but it’s still happening every day, all over the world. This guitar, with its drop-dead curves and near-perfect functionality, has transcended totemic status.

In its 60 years to date, the Fender Stratocaster has nestled right in there alongside the Ray-Ban Wayfarer and Levi’s 501s as a staple of 20th century culture and design that remains 100 per cent relevant. Much imitated, never equalled, not old, not new: it just is. You might even call it timeless.

Like you, I remember the first time I ever saw one, for real, up close. I was 14 and our local pub had a band on. My dad insisted I watched them, having noticed the spark of enthusiasm in me ignited by electric blues. “You might learn something,” he said. “And he plays a real Strat!” Nobody I knew had a real Strat.

The Aran B Sweaters featured one Marco Rossi on the fabled Fender, punching out Albert Collins and T-Bone Walker licks among many others, through a 4x10 Fender Concert. The combination made noises that stirred something very deep that remains with me to this day. My dad was right, I did learn something, and I’m still learning.

I was thinking about Marco on the plane to Umeå, Sweden, back in January this year. It’s probably down to him I was making this journey at all; it’s probably down to him that what’s at the end of it will excite me more than any rock band or superstar ever could. I know it’s not a minter, I know it’s not 100 per cent original, but in many ways, that’s what makes it all the more interesting...

Page 1 of 6
Page 1 of 6
The brothers

The brothers

Twin brothers Mikael and Samuel Åhdén have quite a few guitars. Over 300, it’s said, and thanks to the considerable efforts of a small team of collaborators and the municipality of their home town, Umeå, they’ve offered their collection up for public display in Guitars: The Museum.

Throughout a handful of breathtakingly grand rooms, walls are augmented with gigantic glass cases, each containing treasures that may as well be the Crown Jewels to people like us, albeit way more interesting. They have quite the collection of vintage Fender Stratocasters on display, marking each significant transition in its design; a bewildering array of spaghetti logos, sunbursts, reds, blues and worn nitrocellulose lacquer.

We’d arranged with the brothers to photograph one of their prize 1954 Strats for this feature. Playing it in anger – live or at a recording session – was unfortunately not on the cards, because of the museum’s public opening and all the security surrounding it. But just to see it, to hold it, smell it, knock out a few licks; to get the chance to look closely at another old gem and learn a little more, well, that would be enough.

So here we are, the brothers sat around a table in one of the museum’s restaurants, having gone to the considerable trouble of freeing the treasure from its multiple-stage security. They’re shooting the breeze with the great and the good of the Swedish vintage-guitar scene, while photographer Joby Sessions and I get to work on the Strat, just as we have done on hundreds, maybe thousands of guitars before.

Page 2 of 6
Page 2 of 6
The guitar

The guitar

It never ceases to amaze me: how the hell did they even imagine this in 1954, let alone make it?

In his book The Stratocaster Chronicles, respected guitar author and historian, Tom Wheeler, goes deep into the many accounts of how the Strat first came to be: who was involved and what their input was in order to present – if not entirely reconcile – some differences of opinion and memory from those early days.

It was ultimately Leo’s baby, nobody disputes that, and in its debut year, featured a highly stylised, ‘Comfort Contoured’ ash body, partly in response to player feedback that the Telecaster’s body edges were ‘sharp’ and uncomfortable. There were no CNC machines back then – if there were, Mr Fender would surely have used them – so the bodies were cut on a bandsaw, then shaped and sanded by hand. Ash was reportedly a little harder to work than alder, with a more open grain structure that also required more pore filler before finishing, two reasons the Strat later switched to mostly alder bodies during 1956.

Holding this one now, it’s hard to imagine that the solidbody guitar was still such a new phenomenon back then, widely referred to as the ‘Electric Spanish guitar’, in fact. It’s so curvy. Earlier Strats are known in general – and I stress ‘in general’ – to have slightly deeper, more rounded contours than later guitars. This one flaunts its 60-year-old shapeliness more elegantly than it has any right to, even if its thinned, worn nitrocellulose-lacquer coat has seen better days. It’s got to that wonderful point where it feels at one with the wood – and were it not for the prevalence of good vintage replicas these days, it would probably feel a little bit alien. You can feel more wood than finish; you can hear more music than guitar.

This neck came as a bit of a surprise. You might expect something fairly chunky, maybe even a V (not introduced until 1955, as I later discovered). It’s not one of the very thick, rounded profiles of ’54 folklore, but something that I’d happily pick up and play every day of the week. It feels remarkably like some of the modern-day Fender Heavy Relic necks, which is a testament to the Custom Shop’s attention to detail, perhaps more so to the original design’s enduring brilliance: it worked then, it still works now.

This one has had a refret at some point, making it all the more pleasurable to play; a little extra height on the frets makes choking less of an issue on the vintage-style, curvy maple playing surface (one piece with the neck, remember). You’d scarcely know this was a 60-year-old guitar, and that is perhaps the standout observation.

Page 3 of 6
Page 3 of 6
Number 1108

Number 1108

The first 100 or so Stratocasters from 1954 had their serial numbers stamped into the plastic vibrato-cavity plate, reverting to a four-digit number on the neck plate from around mid-1954.

This guitar has a non-1954 back plate, given away by its oval string holes; originals were round, turning oval in 1955, in order to facilitate easier string changes. Likewise, the tuners are non-original, having been replaced with post-1956-spec Klusons at some point.

As you can see, our guitar is numbered 1108, placing it most likely in latter ’54 (serial numbers were not sequential in terms of date, unfortunately), but along with certain other features, indicates that it may well have been produced on one of the first ‘official’ Stratocaster runs, in October 1954. A good many Strats predate that, of course, almost back to the beginning of the year, even before its ‘official’ release month of April 1954.

The knobs, pickup covers and switch tip are made from what’s often mistermed ‘Bakelite’. It has that slightly translucent look – particularly the pickup covers – and is in fact polystyrene. As you can see, our Strat’s pickup covers have suffered the same fate as those on Buddy Holly’s ’55 Strat, one reason Fender moved to using less-brittle plastics for knobs, switch tips (and later, pickguards).

By this point in late 1954, the Strat’s knobs had evolved to the modern shape we know now, and you might be surprised how white they are; the early white plastics didn’t discolour like later variants did.

Page 4 of 6
Page 4 of 6
The vibrato

The vibrato

While Leo Fender and his colleagues were perfecting the ‘Synchronized Tremolo’ unit, 2,000 miles away in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Gibson was developing the Tune-O-Matic bridge.

For the first time, guitarists would have individual adjustment for string length (intonation), but in the Stratocaster’s case, that also meant individual string-height adjustment and a vibrato unit. Blissfully simple when you look at it now, it was nonetheless a revolution in guitar bridge design back in 1954, even if it did take regular maintenance and a deft hand to confidently hold tuning stability.

Many people – including me – would argue that there is nothing better for the optimum blend of tone, functionality and feel to this day.

Back then, if you’d chosen one with the new wobble-bar – non-Tremolo versions were offered a little later – you’d have had to fork out $249.50. The case was $39.95 extra, and: “of hardshell construction, crushed-plush lined... covered in a grain hair seal, simulated leather covering”, no less. The average US wage in 1954 was around $3,000, so a Strat would have been around a month’s wages.

Page 5 of 6
Page 5 of 6
The myth, the legend

The myth, the legend

What did we learn on our trip to Umeå to see what its owners laughingly call this “old, dusty guitar”? Are we just perpetuating a vintage myth that has no relevance in modern music?

I don’t think so. What’s really astonishing about this guitar is that even 60 years after it was first designed and made, you could chuck it in a gigbag, go and do tonight’s gig and treat it like any other decent Stratocaster that has ever existed.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised, because however revolutionary, the Strat’s near-perfect blend of form and function lies right at the heart of its many other ostensible contradictions: versatile yet simple; futuristic yet timeless; workaday yet remarkable; all different, yet all strangely the same. Above all, it’s a guitar that you dream about, yet one which you can just go out and buy with a few hundred quid... as long as you don’t want this original ’54, of course!

So happy birthday Stratocaster, old buddy. I probably won’t see all of your next 60 years, but if they keep you safe, I know you’ll be as timeless then as you are now.

Page 6 of 6
Page 6 of 6
Mick Taylor
Editor-in-chief, Guitars Group
The magazine for serious players image
The magazine for serious players
Subscribe and save today!
More Info
Read more
Fender American Ultra Luxe 60s Stratocaster
Fender Ultra Luxe Vintage '60s Stratocaster review
Dickey Betts [left] and Warren Haynes trade licks onstage with the Allman Brothers Band at the 1993 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Haynes's Strat would soon be stolen in New York.
How Warren Haynes turned to Les Pauls after his favourite Strat was stolen
Fender Custom Shop Ariel Posen Stratocaster: Posen's new signature model was inspired by the Jazzmaster and has custom-wound AP-90 pickups. Check out those cupcake-style control knobs.
Ariel Posen’s new Custom Shop signature Strat is A) stunning and B) inspired by a… Jazzmaster?
The Fender Richie Kotzen Stratocaster is made in Japan and features a contoured ash body with a stunning figured maple top, and comes with DiMarzio pickups and Gotoh tuners.
Fender gives Richie Kotzen’s figured-maple topped MIJ signature Strat a global release
Kane Hibberd, the photographer behind the Scale exhibition in London, poses in front of his photographs – guitars features will include Kerry King of Slayer's BC Rich and Tom Morello's Arm The Homeless S-style.
Exhibition featuring life-sized photos of 100 legendary artists' guitars to open in London
Mark Speer of Khruangbin sits with his natural finish Fender Strat while Laura Lee holds her new signature Jazz Bass.
Fender unveils DiMarzio-loaded Strat and Jazz Bass for Khruangbin’s Mark Speer and Laura Lee
Latest in Electric Guitars
Don Felder plays his iconic white Gibson doubleneck electric guitar onstage. Note the double jack: that mod is crucial when playing Hotel California, which he surely is in this picture.
Don Felder on why he had to mod his white Gibson doubleneck to play the Eagles’ biggest hit – and how he got the idea from Chet Atkins
PRS Guitars' new limited edition Custom 24 Satin photographed at the brand's Maryland factory with wood blanks in the background.
PRS swaps maple for mango to give its “flagship” Custom 24 a 40th anniversary satin nitro makeover
Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) takes to the air with the Gibson ES-345 that has been missing since Back To The Future wrapped in 1985. On the right, a teaser of a forthcoming Gibson replica of the guitar.
Cesar Gueikian teases Gibson Custom Shop replica of Marty McFly’s “1955” Back To The Future ES-345
The newly refreshed Classic Series from Squier reworks vintage Fender-inspired electric and bass guitars for beginners and budget-conscious players.
Squier channels the Fender archive for 10 stunning yet affordable news Classic Vibe models
Kirk Hammett plays his Mummy ESP onstage with Metallica. In the middle of this comp'd image is the Thinline custom Triplecaster Hammett commissioned then gifted to White. On the right, White plays his Fender Triplecaster with the yellow pickguard.
Kirk Hammett orders up custom version of Jack White’s Triplecaster – and gets one for White, too
“The most talked-about guitar of the summer is coming to the Gibson Garage London”: P-90s, Light Aging from the Murphy Lab, handwritten Oasis lyrics… The Gibson Custom Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard has been unveiled and is here photographed in the Gibson Garage, with a variety of close-ups to show every detail.
Gibson unveils Custom Noel Gallagher Les Paul: hand-signed, limited run – the ultimate Oasis guitar?
Latest in News
Sebastian Bach performs on Day 1 of the Heavy Montreal festival at Parc Jean-Drapeau on August 6, 2016 in Montreal, Canada
“I could kick 'em right in the balls”: Ex-Skid Row man goes on a rant about Youtube armchair critics
Composer John Williams
“I never liked film music very much”: World famous film composer makes startling admission
Deals of the week
MusicRadar deals of the week: Here are the best Labor Day sales for musicians from across the internet
Josh Freese performs onstage with The Vandals during day 1 of Warped Tour at Shoreline Waterfront on July 26, 2025
“It wasn’t music that I really resonated with”: Josh Freese lifts the lid on his exit from the Foo Fighters
Boss PX-1 Plugout FX: the white compact series pedal has blue knobs, digital display, and is a platform for 16 digitally modelled Boss effects, one of which is available at a time.
A compact series stompbox you can turn into any one of 16 classic Boss effects? Meet the Plugout FX
Zak Starkey and Axl Rose composite
“C’mon bro... It could generate $2M for teen cancer”: Zak Starkey pleads with Axl Rose to give the go-ahead for charity cover of Bolan classic

MusicRadar is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...