Today I visited one of the music stores in my city to buy guitar strings for one of my acoustic guitar that I wanted to set up to give the guitar my little cousin. Grandpa called me yesterday by phone to tell me that she is either interested to learn playing keyboard and piano or guitar but she isn´t sure. He asked me if we could check out with one of my acoustic guitars if she can build up interest. I said that this is a cool idea and did clean one of my acoustic guitars but now I needed only fresh strings. It would be a cool news if my cousin wants to learn guitar as well. I was so excited that I today visited one of the music stores in my city to buy her new nylon beginner guitar strings. After getting the strings, I wanted to play a little bit with the electric guitars there.

I love to check out guitars and since there is a Fender Stratocaster on my wish list anyway, and even if it will take a lot of time to save for one, I am very interested to check out all the different models and I do this time by time. I love nearly every aspect on a Stratocaster but I always thought that I disliked the neck of them but I knew that Fender offers so many different models that there would be one with a neck I would like. Today I found this Fender American Vintage Hot Rod 57 Stratocaster in the store and played on it.

I must say that I fell in love with this guitar after playing 5 minutes on the guitar and the guitar wasn´t even plugged to an amp. How could this be? I mean isn´t it much more important to find out how the pickups of the guitar sound? I just had this bare guitar in my hands and was instantly impressed after playing a few minutes. It was all about the neck!

This guitar has a very flat and soft “V” share. It was so flat that playing was so much fun! One thing I always wanted to find out before I buy a Stratocaster or any other guitar, is what kind of neck I would prefer as there are so many different variants today. I didn´t take care much about this aspect when I was younger but this time I will. I was confused by all the terms like “V” or “C” shape and so on. But I must say that if this neck is called flat or soft “V” shape, then do know now in which direction I will head if I saved enough money some day. That was something I tried to find out since a year now and it wasn´t easy as the stores here don´t have a huge range of guitars I could test. But I found the answer now. This is a neck I love, really.

If I am ever able to save up some money for a Stratocaster then I will buy one with a soft “V” shape neck. It was a hell of fun to play on this guitar and I also loved the string distance to the frets. Pushing strings to play guitar is a wrong description here. It is so different to my guitar at home and playing on the Fender American Vintage Hot Rod 57 Stratocaster is much more comfortable. With much more I mean that this is truly a huge difference. I forgot the time when I played on this one and when I thought “I should ask them if they can set up an amp and a few stomp boxes for me” I realized that it is already pretty late as I had still some other things on my to-do list.

I am really ok with Stratocaster´s that have just three normal single coil pickups like the old ones but this one had two and one strange bridge pickup that looked different than a normal pickup. Not sure about this. As said, I sadly didn´t have much more time to check this out but I will. But anyway I found my favorite neck shape today and that is already pretty cool as I can now write this down as own aspect I look for when I saved up enough money some day.

I still had enough time to take a look on the price sticker of the Vintage Hot Rod 57 and that did hurt. This guitar would go away for round about 1700 Euro and converted this would be round about 2300 US Dollar. I closed my eye´s and leaved the store.

It was anyway funny but coming days I will set up the acoustic guitar for my little cousin and hope she can build up interests. Grandpa said that she will have a guitar and keyboard project in the school soon in her music classes. It would be exciting if she is really interested. I could help her a lot as I play guitar and grandpa too.