White Squier Stratocaster10/8/2021
Black, white, sunburst and (Torino shade) red were the only listed options by 1993. Later adverts however, didn't mention this colour. This Sonic Blue colour, prone to turning slightly greenish due to yellowing in the top coats, was common in the first Silver Series batches. It is a double-cutaway guitar, with an extended top 'horn' shape for balance.The first Squier Silver Series Strats did not have a 'Silver Series' identifier on the headstock. The Fender Stratocaster, colloquially known as the Strat, is a model of electric guitar designed from 1952 into 1954 by Leo Fender, Bill Carson, George Fullerton and Freddie Tavares.The Fender Musical Instruments Corporation has continuously manufactured the Stratocaster from 1954 to the present.Maple neck with 'C'-shaped profile. This is all UK-specific.Key Features. The left hand version of the guitar was advertised in sunburst and black only.Had Fender not resolved to compete with the new Korean-built instruments on level terms, they could very well have been stifled out of the budget market, from the bottom up. On the UK market, the cheap, cheerful and well-featured Marlin Sidewinder had been hammering the Squier Strat’s sales, ending up topping the bestsellers chart for nearly two solid years. But in the mid ‘eighties, they were forced by the massive success of much cheaper, Korean-made guitars (the Marlin range, for example), to rethink. You might find one or two surprises.Fender had produced Squier Stratocasters exclusively in Japan between 19.
This meant that by 1988, no Squier-branded quitars were coming out of Japan. Essentially, Fender did continue producing their standard model of Squier Strat in Japan, but it was promoted to full Fender status to avoid an impossible battle for sales against the massively cheaper Korean-made Squiers. I only have access to UK-focused info, but here in England, the Korean Squier Strat almost immediately became the nation’s best selling guitar, finally subordinating the Marlin Sidewinder in the market. With unprecedented low prices, the MIK (Made in Korea) Squier was exactly what Fender needed to hit back at the Korean-made brands now dominating so much of the budget sector. Not only would it help confuse and potentially turn around the decline in Squier’s brand image, it would also remove what was essentially a rebranded MIJ Squier Strat from the base end of the Fender price range. If young guitarists weren’t previously thinking “avoid plywood guitars!”, some of them certainly were now.It made a lot of sense for Fender to start shipping Japanese Squiers again at this point. In order to take sales away from the likes of Fender whilst promoting the superiority of their own product, Korean manufacturers (Young Chang in particular), homed in on the Squier’s plywood construction, and used it as a negative marketing ploy in their ads. They wanted to produce higher budget guitars, and trade on quality and value, rather than purely price. Fundamentally, some Korean manufacturers were not content with making rockbottom budget instruments only. But as the 1990s got underway, a number of new commercial dangers for Fender began to make themselves apparent. The headstock markings were pretty much the same as the ones on the Hank Marvin, but minus the signature. They had a mid to late ‘80s style Squier Japan Stratocaster logo, with ‘Squier’ in silver ‘transition’ script. Here’s something you may not know, and which could solve a few mysteries…The first Silver Series Strats imported into the UK did not have a ‘Silver Series’ logo on the headstock. I think initially it was three-ply for rosewood, and single-ply for maple, in keeping with vintage reissue tradition.Both the Hank Marvin model and the Silver Series Strats were introduced with a UK RRP of £275, but the first dealer ads I saw for them, which would have been submitted for publication in January '92, priced the guitars at £249.There’s a lot of speculation online regarding Squier guitars, and for a couple of reasons I’m now about to detail, the early Silver Series jobs tend to prove very confusing. I’ve seen rosewood board and maple neck Silver Series Strats with three-ply plates, and maple neck with single-ply, but I haven't seen a rosewood board version with a single-ply. Whilst the Squier Hank Marvin Strats always had a single-ply white scratchplate, the Silver Series Strats could have either three-ply white/black/white, three-ply black/white/black, single-ply white, or single-ply black. White Squier Stratocaster Serial Numbers CorrespondBut other outlets did bill them as Silver Series, and the Silver Series name definitely appeared well before the headstock logos were added.It’s important to recognise, though, that not all Japanese Strats with silver ‘transition’-style Squier logos are Silver Series. Because there was no way to tell that the first of these new Japanese Squiers were meant to be Silver Series guitars, some shops advertised them in the first month as Squier Standard Strats (Japan). Such guitars will be from the initial Silver Series batches. This is not the case (not that I know of, anyway). Due to the fact that some of the serial numbers correspond with the year 1990, a notion has arisen that there was such a thing as a 1990 Squier MIJ Strat. Their Tele did have the Silver Series logo on the headstock their Strat didn’t. Guitarist reviewed a Strat and a Tele. To give some idea of the timeframe, the Squier Silver Series guitars were reviewed in the July 1992 edition of Guitarist. I'll detail the main features shortly.Very soon, the Silver Series markings were added. I replaced an early '90s Fender Japan '62 reissue body with a Squier Hank Marvin body, and liked the sound of the Marvin body better.The machineheads on the ’92 Silver Series Strats were Gotohs, of very good quality. They normally had superior shaping to the ’57 and ’62 Japanese Fender bodies, with smoother and rounder edges, but since the Japanese Reissues were quite unpredictable around this time, that wasn’t always the case.I suspect Fender Japan were using a higher grade of wood for their vintage reissues, but that doesn't always, by default, translate to better tone. In some respects the Squier bodies were actually better. The ’92 Japanese Squier bodies were definitely produced entirely separately from those on the Japanese Fender reissues. However, the bodies were definitely not identical to those on the Japanese ’57 or ’62 Strat Reissues. They had individual cavities for each pickup, and no extra wood relief under the scratchplate, beyond the standard routings a vintage Strat would have. The five-way switch was the usual enclosed YM50, and the pots were cheapo minis. Other guitarists may describe the tone as a bit 'boxy' for a Strat. The pickups were ceramics with bar magnets across their bases, but they had quite a thick sound for a slim single coil, which suited some guitarists. The electrics were cheap, but not necessarily that nasty.
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