Fender Player Stratocaster

If it ain’t broke… just tweak it some more. Fender’s new guise for the Mexican Standard makes small changes that add up to quite a lot. The single-coils are an updated set of Alnico 5s with a punchier midrange and useful tone control arrangement with one handling the neck and middle, and the second adjusting the bridge. But that’s not all…

We said: “Then there’s that new two-point vibrato, which is one of the smoothest- operating systems we’ve encountered at this price point, with no problems returning to pitch. By their very nature, Strats will always pay homage to the past, but this particular edition packs tones that span the decades and bring the format bang up to date.”