FENDER PLAYER PLUS STRATOCASTER

An extension of Fender’s Mexican-made Player series, the four-guitar Player Plus series adds features such as a flatter 305mm (12-inch) fingerboard radius with quite heavily radius’d fingerboard edges, upgraded block bridge saddles and hum-cancelling Noiseless pickups. Think American Ultra spec but for a lot less money. The guitars are also offered in ‘fade’ finishes, but our pictured model is the classy muted metallic Opal Spark blue. Along with our featured Strat, the range includes a standard Tele, a Stratocaster HSS that adds a Wide Range-style covered full-size humbucker at the bridge, and a three-pickup Nashville Tele that squeezes in a Strat-style Noiseless pickup in the middle position. As we’ve seen in recent years, Fender likes to add more sounds to its classics. The Player Plus is no different, and a pull-switch on the lower tone control adds the neck pickup to position 1 (bridge) and 2 (bridge and middle). The hum-cancelling pickups lose that noise that can plague Fender’s classic single coils, of course, but deliver an unmistakable voice that we said had “bags of crisp clarity with excellent bouncy, funky mixes and a pretty standard output – certainly not ‘hot’”.