The ugliest Fender Strat made in 2018
Good guitar. Bad color.
The Deluxe Strat is a modern offering from Fender with three "vintage noiseless" pickups, push/push mini switch to add in the bridge pickup for positions 4 and 5, modern two-point bridge, 12" radius fingerboard, contoured neck heel and locking tuners.
This is a good guitar. But it looks horrible in Sapphire Blue Transparent.
Now to note, this guitar is available in three other finishes, 2-color sunburst, black and vintage blonde. And any one of those is better than the blue.
The reason why the blue doesn't work on this Strat is because it makes it look cheap.
Transparent blue is a color you expect to see on something like this low-cost Ibanez... or even cheaper with a sub-$100 no-name guitar. You don't expect to see it on a Deluxe Model Strat that costs significantly more, but yet it exists.
However, there is a bright side. This is one of the very few guitars in Fender's current lineup that looks like it got hit with the ugly stick. As said above, there are 3 other colors that look notably better for the same model.
My personal pick for the best looking Deluxe Strat is the 2-color sunburst. That one has a look done right.
Some guys like a Stratocaster with gold hardware
Is gold on a Fender Strat a bit kitschy? Yes. But there are some guys that like it.
A guitar that has the gold is the Fender Special Run '50s Stratocaster with the full gold treatment. And by full treatment, I mean that almost every single thing that is metal on this guitar is gold. Bridge, string saddles, all screws (including screws that hold the rear plate,) neck bolt plate, tuner buttons, tuning posts, strap buttons, string guide and even the tremolo arm.
The only things not gold on this Strat are the pickup pole pieces and the frets. Other than that, all metal parts are in a gold color.
I've mentioned guitars with the gold hardware treatment here before and will mention the same warnings I always do whenever I talk about one of these based on my personal experience.
Gold finishing will wear off over time if the guitar is played regularly.
On this particular Strat, the gold will wear down at the bridge around where the 4, 5 and 6 strings sit. Why? Because most Strat players rest their picking hand palm on the bridge when playing. All that palm rubbing over time wears the gold off where you'll see steel come through eventually. This is not necessarily a bad look when it happens, but just know that yes, it will happen.
The gold will also get a bit dinged and scratched up at the output jack from plugging and unplugging a guitar cord in there over time as well. The gold won't wear down, but scratches will happen and that's just the way it is.
My biggest warning however about gold hardware guitars is this: Do NOT lose anything that comes with this guitar. If you don't use that tremolo arm, don't throw it out. Just store it away somewhere. If you swap out anything gold for different hardware, the same applies. Keep all the original gold stuff.
Do you keep the gold hardware for resale value? No. You keep it because it's difficult to source official Fender replacements just in case you ever want to put your guitar back to 100% original condition. If you want regular steel stuff, those parts are easy to source. For gold, not-so much. Yes, you can get third-party gold hardware, but the color will be slightly different than the gold already on the guitar.
And speaking of color, gold changes even with Fender-issued parts from year to year. On some years it's brighter while on other years it has more yellow in it and is slightly darker.
Again, if you buy this guitar, just make sure to keep all original hardware and you'll be fine. Lose hardware, and you'll kick yourself for it.
What does this guitar sound like?
It is usually true that Fender will put pickups with AlNiCo (aluminum, cobalt, nickel) magnets in them that are III strength for '50s model Strats and V strength for '60s model Strats. Generally speaking, AlNiCo III has less volume with greater treble response while AlNiCo V has more volume with less treble response.
Said in plain English: Unless stated otherwise, a Strat designated as a '50s guitar by Fender has "very clean" voicing to it. When you want a Strat with that sought-after "bell-like chime,", pickups with the AlNiCo III pole piece magnets are usually the best way to get that sound - and that should be what's in this particular Strat with gold hardware.
And remember, the easy way to boost volume with pickups that have AlNiCo III magnets is just to use a compressor effect; there's no shame in doing that. When you want the bell-like chime and some boost for more prominent notes and chords, that's the way to get it.
Worth getting?
If you like the gold, yes.
Does this guitar cost any more than a non-gold '50s Strat? Yes, but not by too much, relatively speaking.
Can you get this guitar with a rosewood fingerboard? No. Strats designated as '50s guitars all have 1-piece maple necks. Strats designated as '60s guitars all have rosewood (or other darker wood) fingerboards.
Fender Limited Edition 60th Anniversary Triple Jazzmaster
I'm having a difficult time deciding whether this is cool or not.
The Fender Limited Edition 60th Anniversary Triple Jazzmaster is expensive. But then again, it's a 60th anniversary model and does come with a brown hardshell case. However, it's a modern guitar. Fender as far as I know didn't make a Jazzmaster like this 60 years ago, and describes this guitar as "an homage to the mod ethos that permeates the cult of the Jazzmaster". If you have no idea what that means, neither do I.
What's the color called? Fender didn't say what it is on their product page, so I can't tell you. Looks like Daphne Blue...? What I can say is the guitar has a gloss nitro finish on both the body and neck.
Aside from that, what we've got here is this:
- Alder body
- Maple neck with "'60s Oval C shape", binding, 21 narrow/tall frets, rosewood fingerboard with 9.5" radius, bone nut, slotted tuners, pearloid dot inlays, heel-adjusted truss rod
- A trio of Filter'Tron pickups with Stratocaster 5-way switching
- 4-ply tortoise shell pick guard
- Jazzmaster vibrato system (includes lock button,) with strings sitting on Mustang saddles
- Witch hat knobs
- Special 60th anniversary engraved neck bolt plate on the back
I'm having a hard time deciding if this is cool or not because it's a combination of things both great and awful at the same time.
Looks-wise, yes, this guitar nails it. All the gleaming metalwork of the bridge + pickups set off nicely from the tortoise shell guard. The neck binding works here as do the pearloid dot inlays to complement the pickups. Great appearance all around. I love the "busy" logo work on the pegboard. All the styled text that includes "WITH SYNCHRONIZED FLOATING TREMOLO" is just cool. Love that. Very Fender, very nice.
Function-wise, this guitar also nails it. While I'm not really a fan of 3-pickup guitars these days, Strat players could easily pick up this thing and start wailing away on it easily.
I do not like the heel-adjusted truss rod. Yeah, it makes the guitar look better without the truss rod adjustment hole at the pegboard, but after owning a Jazzmaster with the heel-adjust, I'll never own one again. Having to physically take off the neck of the guitar every time I want to make a small truss rod adjustment gets annoying real quick.
I do not like Mustang saddles on the Jazzmaster. Yes, I understand most players prefer it, but I don't because for me it takes away adjustability of the guitar.
Fender didn't say what the K value of the potentiometers are. Traditional Jazzmaster electronics has a 1M pot with linear taper for volume and 1M pot with audio taper for tone. And if that's what's on this guitar... that might be a bit too screechy for most players. But if Fender used 500K pots (doesn't matter what taper is used,) that would work better with the Filter'Tron pickups for my ear.
Ultimately, I think the guitar works well for what it is. And what is it? A hot-rodded Jazzmaster. Maybe that's what Fender meant by "an homage to the mod ethos." If Fender is saying this is a hot-rod Jazzmaster, mission accomplished.
Anyone who owns this particular axe will at bare minimum get a ton of eye candy, because photos do no justice for nitro finished Fender guitars. In my experience, a Fender blue in the lighter hue coated in nitro just pops with color like you wouldn't believe.
As a player's guitar, if you're okay with that heel-adjusted truss rod, the Strat-style switching should make this Jazzmaster very easy to get along with.
Revstar with dual P-90 pickups is cool
This is a lesser-known guitar to begin with, and this particular model with the dual P-90 pickups is even more rare.
The Yamaha Revstar has been around since 2015, so at the time I write this in late 2018, it hasn't even been around for 4 years yet.
Yamaha has tried different things with this model that included different colors and so on, but this one in particular, model RS502T in Bowden Green is the best I've seen yet. This is also available in a very tuxedo-looking piano black finish.
Compared to other Revstar models, this one has a white guard, creme cover P90 pickups and a covered tailpiece. The pickups are a big deal because it gives the guitar a much more twangy and trebly sound. The creme color guard, pickup covers and addition of the tail piece cover really add a touch of class to the instrument.
It's not that the Revstar wasn't classy before, but these small changes really make the guitar a fantastic looker. What Yamaha achieved with this is retro-yet-not-retro, which is not an easy thing to accomplish. This guitar is totally modern yet has 1950s style touches to it while at the same time not ripping off anybody.
When I say Yamaha has tried different things with the Revstar, I wasn't kidding. There's even a "denim" finish version with toaster style pickups in it and a Bigsby system attached. That's the RS720B model.
I believe however that Yamaha got it right with the RS502T. It's a more reserved design that's elegant and brings home the tone with the dual P-90 pickups.
It's good this guitar exists. It's not just another copy of some other more established famous guitar design. This is a modern Yamaha electric guitar that's not trying to be anything else but a Yamaha, and it's doing a darned good job at it.
I do hope Yamaha sells a ton of these, because the sound that comes out of a pair of P-90 pickups is incredible when in a well-made guitar. And this guitar is well-made.
The film that almost killed Disney
I finally got to re-watch this movie after seeing it more than 30 years ago. It's October as I write this, which means Halloween is coming, so this is a good film to write about.
In the mid-2000s, I made a decision to re-watch a bunch of movies I saw as a kid. One of them that I couldn't watch was Disney's The Black Cauldron because no DVD release was available at the time. It didn't become available until some years later, but I didn't know that, so I just gave up. However, I just found out it's on Amazon and available to stream, so I finally got to re-watch this again.
The first time I saw The Black Cauldron was in 1985 when in theaters. Before re-watching this, I remembered next to nothing about this flick other than it had this villain so scary that it was enough to give any kid nightmares. More on that in a moment. I also vaguely remembered the red eyes of the villain and red smoke that took on skull shapes during certain cauldron scenes.
When re-watching this, I wasn't sure if this was the movie I just had vague memories of from so many years ago. But the moment The Horned King's face appeared on screen, yep, this was the one. This was that elusive Disney movie I had been searching to see again for so long...
...and it was fantastic. This is by far one of the darkest Disney animated movies ever made. It's so dark that on a test screening, kids were fleeing from the theater crying, along with angry parents thinking this was going to be some kind of happy-go-lucky Disney movie when it definitely is not. The Horned King character, the way he was voiced, his animations and everything else about him will scare the crap out of kid.
Critics of the time actually liked this movie, but parents and kids hated it. And I mean REALLY hated it.
The Black Cauldron unofficially earned the title of "the film that almost killed Disney". It did not do well in the theaters, and Disney lost a bundle on this one. They lost so much cash on it that it was put into question whether Disney animation studios was even worth keeping in operation.
This film did so bad in the theaters that Disney did not release a home video copy of it for over 10 years. And when they did finally release one in the VHS format in 1997, it was only in the UK, probably to test the waters just to see if fans would recoil from this flick seeing the light of day again. Fans didn't recoil but instead quite enjoyed it, so about a year later in 1998, Disney released a VHS edition in the United States. And for the DVD release, that didn't happen until 2010!
Is the movie bad?
No. While true the characters aren't really that memorable, this is not a bad movie...
...but it's dark. Dark enough to where it's not kid-friendly, but not so dark as to be considered horror.
The one thing fans of this movie want - myself included - is that infamous 12 minutes of deleted scenes that show the undead army fighting other soldiers, which includes one soldier's flesh rotting off and another tossed into a green pool and "misting" (as in melting) to death. I'm not into horror nor gore, but to see that stuff in a Disney animated film would be incredible.
Disney has never released that 12 minutes of The Black Cauldron deleted scenes. Should they? Yes. It was fans of the movie that pleaded and outright begged for the movie to be released on home video in the first place that got it there. These same fans to this day still want to see those 12 minutes, but Disney has never delivered. The "deleted scenes" on the DVD releases do not show the undead fight sequences.
Those 12 minutes caused a lot of infighting at Disney between the film producer, the studio chairman and even went all the way to the CEO himself. The story of what happened with this flick, the very rocky road it took just to get it out to theaters, the fact it was originally scheduled for a Christmas 1984 release before rescheduled to a later '85 release, and tons of other things just make The Black Cauldron a fascinating film.
After re-watching this, I can honestly say that yes, I enjoyed it.
I can also say that yes, if Disney grew a backbone, spent the money and put back in those 12 minutes, I'm 100% certain home video sales would not only make up the cost but also turn a profit. From what I understand, fans of The Black Cauldron would throw money as Disney just to see what the true original cut of the film was supposed to be. I know I would.
Even though those infamous 12 minutes aren't in the film, I'm still glad Disney actually released The Black Cauldron out on home video. It's a great movie, especially for those interested in seeing the darkest Disney animated film of all time.