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1. #2006 FENDER HIGHWAY ONE STRATOCASTER UPGRADE#
2. #2006 FENDER HIGHWAY ONE STRATOCASTER PLUS#
3. #2006 FENDER HIGHWAY ONE STRATOCASTER PROFESSIONAL#

They can give you a gritty, bluesy lead tone, as Gary Clark could no doubt tell you. They can chime like crazy if that’s what you need them to do. It’s pretty much stock, other than the bridge – the original unit buzzed annoyingly so I replaced it with a Tone Pros (once again, courtesy of Andy Gibson). You know the drill: P90s, no centre block, trapeze tailpiece. It’s an Epiphone Casino, in natural finish. My third electric is an in-betweener, although I bought it before the Les Paul, in 2014.

Now I can clean the pots if I need to, and it’ll be easier to change pots and pickups down the line if I get the urge. That said, I’m pretty sceptical of some of Gibson’s cost-cutting measures like mounting all of the wiring on a PCB, so I asked Andy Gibson (yes, him again) to pull all that out and rewire it by hand.

I’d never really seen myself as a Les Paul guy, but there was no denying it. The Les Paul could do aggressive, but it sounded sweeter played clean, and seemed more versatile. The SG Standard had a thin neck, wide but low frets and high-output pickups – it just felt aggressive in a way that even a set-up (lowering the pickup height, raising the strings a little) wouldn’t have compensated for. Les Paul, close upĪnyway, this Les Paul was more to my taste in terms of feel than any of the SGs I tried, even the one I liked the most, which was the Standard.

#2006 FENDER HIGHWAY ONE STRATOCASTER PLUS#

That’s actually a plus point for me – as you can probably tell, given I love the Takamine EN series soundhole rosette and I stripped the finish off my Stratocaster, I’m very much of the less-is-more school aesthetically. They have the same pickups as Studios, but an even more stripped-down finish. Les Paul Tributes are the cheapest Gibson LP range, selling for a couple of hundred quid less than Studios. James McKean and the Blueberry Moon, Spit & Sawdust 2019 Although I’d have willingly paid whatever the asking was for an SG Standard if I’d have fallen in love with it, the Les Paul was about £300 cheaper, too (like my Highway One Strat, it had been discounted as it was the previous year’s model). Thing is, when I tried out various SG Standards, Specials and ’61 Reissues in a shop in Camden, I didn’t like any of them as much as a Les Paul Tribute model that I’d tried out on a whim because it was on display near the till.

#2006 FENDER HIGHWAY ONE STRATOCASTER UPGRADE#

I hung on to it for years but decided in 2019 I’d earned an upgrade to a Gibson model. In 1997, while still at school, I did a few weeks’ work for my dad during the summer holidays and used the money earned to buy an Epiphone SG. My other main electric is my most recent purchase. That same Strat, stripped bare and refinished by Andy Gibson. To aid tuning stability (which I have to say is rock solid), the tremolo is blocked off. It’s put in a lot of hard yards for me, but still looks, sounds and plays great. Mine began life a cool translucent blue, but about four years ago I followed my heart and asked the great Andy Gibson (guitar tech based in Denmark Street) to remove the paint, so I’d have the natural-finish Strat I’d hankered after for years.

Live with Carterhaugh at the Camden Eye, 2008. They had thin nitrocellulose finishes, supposedly designed to scuff up and look played-in quickly, but again, that was probably at least partly a cost-reduction thing.

#2006 FENDER HIGHWAY ONE STRATOCASTER PROFESSIONAL#

Highway Ones were conceived as workhorse “player’s” guitars – officially American made, but with at least some of the manufacturing process taking place in Fender’s Mexican factory, and hence sold at a lower price than American Standard and Professional models (or whatever they were called at that point). Because it was an older model, it had been discounted, bringing it down to a price where I could, at a stretch, afford it. I bought it new in 2007, but I think it had been kicking around in the shop for a year or two as it has a 1960s-style small headstock, and at some point around 2006 the Highway One range was revamped, with the Strats getting bigger, ’70s-style headstocks (and hotter pickups). My longest-serving electric is a Fender Highway One Stratocaster.