Author: Pete Prown

Fender’s Signature line of Strats and Teles have always been of great interest to guitar players, and are now even more so since they’ve updated the Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck signature Stratocasters.

What’s different, you ask? The Clapton Strat is fitted a trio of Fender’s new Vintage Noiseless pickups, which complement its powerful active-tone controls. The Beck axe also sports new pickups, but also a new neck shape and a contoured heel. Let’s dive into greater detail and see what each guitar has to offer.

The basic materials on the Eric Clapton include an alder body, a maple neck with a soft “V” shape, and a 22-fret maple fingerboard with a 9.5″ (241mm) radius. Its chrome hardware includes Fender/Gotoh locking tuners and a “blocked” American Vintage tremolo. (It’s blocked because Clapton doesn’t actually use the tremolo, but simply prefers this style of bridge. Hey, he’s Eric Clapton – he can do whatever the heck he wants.)

For electronics, this Strat has three Vintage Noiseless pickups with a 5-way selector and active electronics. The top tone knob is a Master TBX Tone Control. The TBX stands for T (treble) B (bass) X (Cut) and it is a 500K-1M ohm control with a center-notched knob. When the control is in the center, the circuit is not on. If you turn the control one way, the bass is increased (treble cut) and the other way boosts the treble (bass cut). In plain English, the TBX invokes a dramatic tone shift: super-muted and bassy like a jazz guitar when turned one way, and bright and crystal-clear the other. It’s very impressive.

The bottom tone control is the Master Active Mid Boost (0-25 dB), which is simply a midrange booster. This can be useful for solos when you want a little extra oomph to get you over the top. More on this later. Finally, in the groovy color department, Slowhand has chosen Olympic White, Black, Pewter, Torino Red, and Candy Green.

Over to El Becko. The guitar of this fabled Stratmeister is also laden with new features. One of the biggest is its new neck shape. The original Beck guitar had a big ol’ “C” shape neck that was intimidating to some, feeling more like a Louisville Slugger bat than a guitar neck. Available in Olympic White or sexy Surf Green, the new Beck Signature has a smaller “C” profile that is more user-friendly. It’s not tiny by any means, but considerably more diminutive than its predecessor. Other neck features are 22-fret rosewood fingerboard (also 9.5″ in radius) and a contoured heel for easier access to the upper frets.

For pickups, the Beck has dual-coil Ceramic Noiseless models and passive electronics with a master volume and two tones. It also features an American 2-point synchronized tremolo with an LSR Roller Nut on the other end of the neck. The result is one of the most flexible whammies around – indeed, you can safely say the tremolo plays like buttah.

So enough gabbing about specs – how do these Strats sound and play? I always think of Eric Clapton as a more traditional rock player than Jeff Beck, but ironically, the Clapton Strat is clearly the more hi-tech instrument of the two. Tonally, you can get a fine array of Strat tones, from bell-like to the down and dirty. The TBX and Mid Boost controls can really beef up the tone to the point where the Vintage Noiseless pickups sound more like humbuckers. I ladled on the distortion and, coupled with the Mid Boost, evoked some ‘bucker tones not too from those of Carlos Santana, a player who tone is synonymous with humbuckers. Essentially, you can think of the new Clapton Strat as two guitars in one – dial in a Stratocaster tone for some parts and then use the active tone controls to bring in some fat humbucker colors.

As for playability, the Clapton’s “V” neck is also very comfortable, as the V profile really sits snugly in the palm of your fretting hand. The excellent fretwork also allows for super-low action, if that’s your cup of tea.

The Jeff Beck guitar is more of a straight-ahead Strat, with passive tone controls on its dual-coil pickups. You can get a bevy of classic Stratocaster sounds, and really crank it up with distortion. The alder-bodied guitar sounds very bright and should be able to cut through just about any playing situation. And again, I was really impressed by the premium hardware: a great tremolo system, roller nut, and locking tuners.

While the neck is slimmer than the original Beck Strat, it’s still substantial, particularly around the lower frets – in short, this neck is a handful. But I got used to it after a while and it’s hard to deny the tone that a fat, resonant neck can help produce. If you put a skinnier neck on this guitar, it likely wouldn’t sound as full and meaty. Such is the reality of guitar physics.

Wrapping up, Fender has done a great job in updating these two Stratocasters. If I was in the position to choose one versus the other, I’d opt for the Beck, due to its chunky Strat tones and truly wicked whammy. But I could see another player going for the Clapton due to its wide range of sounds and that very comfortable “V” neck. Either way, you can’t lose. These are both excellent Stratocasters and definitely worth a test drive at your local guitar shop.

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Fender Jeff Beck Artist Signature Series Stratocaster
Type of Guitar: Electric solidbody.
Features: Alder body, maple C-shaped neck, rosewood finger-board, medium jumbo frets, 25.5″ scale length, chrome Fender/Schaller Deluxe locking mach-ine heads, 2-point synchronized tremolo with stainless steel saddles, three dual-coil ceramic Vintage Noise-less pickups, 5-position switch, mast-er- volume, TBX tone circuit, aged knobs and pickup covers.
Price: $1,849.
Contact: Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, (480) 596-9690, www.fender.com.

Fender Eric Clapton Artist Signature Series Stratocaster
Type of Guitar: Electric solidbody.
Features: Alder body, maple “soft V”-shaped neck, maple fingerboard, Vintage Style frets, 25.5″ scale length, chrome Fender/Gotoh Vintage Style tuning machines, “Blocked” American Vintage Syn-chronized Tremolo, three Vintage Noiseless pickups, 5-position switch, master vol-ume, TBX tone circuit with active midrange boost.
Price: $1,849.
Contact: Fender Musical Instru-ments Corporation, (480) 596-9690, www. fender.com.

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CS1 electric 6-string courtesy of Citron.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s Sept. ’01 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

It’s always been a struggle for home recordists to capture a good guitar tone on tape or hard disk. Yamaha, however, wants to cure that often aggravating dilemma. To that end, its new DG Stomp guitar preamplier is intended to be the “magical box” that can do it all – just plug in your guitar, run another line out to your mixer or soundcard, and press “Record.” Does Yamaha succeed with its grand mission? Let’s find out.

Based on the preamp section of Yamaha’s DG line of digital guitar amplifiers, the DG Stomp packs a tremendous number of features and effects into its road-ready metal housing. With both factory presets and user-editable programs, guitarists can find an array of tones to play with, from distortions galore to a broad spectrum of clean and special-effects sounds. Among the effects are distortion (created using Yamaha’s Electronic Circuit Modeling, or ECM, circuit), compressor, chorus, flanger, phaser, rotary speaker, tremolo, digital delay, tape echo, spring reverb, hall reverb, plate reverb, tap-tempo delay, and 16 types of speaker simulation. There are 180 patches in all, plus a built-in tuner, and you can set the DG Stomp to activate eight effects as once. You can even plug in an expression pedal for real-time control of various effects, such as volume, wah-wah, and more (there are also MIDI In/Out jacks, if you’re into saving your edited patches on a computer, etc.).

As far as getting started, it’s fairly intuitive. There are heavy-duty “Up” and “Down” switches to change presets or activate the tuner. The DG Stomp also has vintage chickenhead knobs to manually adjust volume, gain, treble, midrange, and bass, and presence – just like a conventional guitar amp. We began by flying through a number of presets, finding lots of good, usable sounds along the way; solid distortions, echo/delay, and nice modulation effects (chorus, phaser, flanger, etc.). Try plugging it into a PA or acoustic-guitar amp, too. Remember, the DG Stomp is a preamp, so with the amp simulations, it sounds great through a full-range speaker configuration, even the crunch tones. If you’re in a pinch, you could even go to a gig with just this box and have the soundman plug it straight into the mixer. That’s not a problem for the DG Stomp.

With all these programs at your disposal, you can edit and save them, using the knobs to set the EQ to just the right “sweet spot,” or adding effects to spice things up. One cool feature is that the effect LEDs double as on/off buttons, making it quite easy to adjust your effects on the fly. And don’t forget the amp simulations. You get a knob on the far left that gives you options for lead, drive, crunch, and clean amps to choose from (these settings basically give you everything from metal crunch to clean tones, and varying overdrive colors in between).

For our road test, we plugged the box in between Fender and Ibanez solidbodies, and a variety of amps and a PA. But our acid test was cutting some tracks to our Dell PC’s hard drive. Could the DG Stomp introduce believable guitar tones into the cold world of digital recording? Actually, the resulting tracks were fairly impressive, especially those that ladled on the heavy crunch – yes, this box screams. In particular, we found a fat, crunchy sound that sounded remarkably like Eric Johnson’s fabled tone, even through our small computer speakers (it even had Eric’s patented echo). That alone seemed worth the price of admission.

As with most digital boxes, however, capturing the soft overdrive of a good Fender-style tube amp remains elusive. It’s okay here, but it ain’t no Bassman, so don’t sell that vintage amp just yet. The box’s clean tones were passable, though perhaps a little on the thin side (this, however, is not unusual for digital amps). Clean or dirty, we advise tweaking the factory presets to find meatier tones. But overall, We were pleased with the DG Stomp, especially since the user has the flexibility to adjust tones and effects at a moment’s notice.

In all, the DG Stomp offers an enormous amount of flexibility for a box with a list price of $299. While nothing yet beats a good amp and some well-placed mics, few of us have the room to create this kind of studio setup. In that light, a good direct box/preamp can be a lifesaver, and the DG Stomp fills that role nicely. If you want tone and digital effects control in a “one box” environment, give this unit a test drive. There are lots of goodies here for the home recordist to experiment with.

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Yamaha DG Stomp
Type Of Pedal: Guitar preamp/recorder.
Features: Electronic Circuit Modeling, eight amp types, 16 Speaker cabinet models, compressor, chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, rotary, tape echo, three reverbs, tap tempo delay, tuner, stereo and headphone output
four built-in footswitches.
Price: $299
Contact: Yamaha, (714) 522-9011, www.yamahaguitars.com.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s July. ’01 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.