Fender Custom Shop Ritchie Blackmore Tribute Stratocaster.

[Matt White]

Nice!

http://www.guitaraficionado.com/namm-2013-fender-custom-shop-introduces-ritchie-blackmore-tribute-strat.html

The Fender Custom Shop is paying tribute to the “anvil” used to forge one of the greatest guitar riffs in rock history, the one from Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” by releasing the limited-edition Fender Custom Shop Ritchie Blackmore Tribute Stratocaster.

Limited to 2013 production only, the guitar is a meticulously crafted replica of the black Fender Stratocaster Blackmore played with Deep Purple in the early ’70s, including the recording of seminal album Machine Head and the band’s greatest hit single.

“Smoke on the Water” was released on album in 1972 and as a single in May 1973. A major hit, it reached Number 4 on the Billboard pop singles chart in the US and propelled Machine Head into the top 10 worldwide.

The Fender Custom Shop Ritchie Blackmore Tribute Stratocaster has a two-piece alder body with a lightly worn Black urethane finish, a ’69 “U”-shaped maple neck, 7.25”-radius maple fingerboard with medium jumbo frets, and custom ’69 Stratocaster pickups hand-wound by Fender legend Abigail Ybarra.

Other features include three-way pickup switching, Schaller tuners, Micarta nut, four-bolt neck plate stamped with the serial number and the stylized Fender “F,” and a vintage-style synchronized tremolo equipped with Blackmore’s distinctive custom ¼” arm. Each instrument also includes an exclusive rear-headstock tribute decal, certificate of authenticity and orange-line black textured vinyl case with a “Fender Amp” logo.

Visit fender.com for more information.




Must have to scallop the neck yourself!

[Kristy]

Pretty guitar.

[chefcraig]

Must have to scallop the neck yourself!

I wonder if featuring the jumbo frets, Fender figured they could dodge that particular bullet? You also have to wonder where and when Blackmore began scalloping his fretboards in the first place. Didn't he only start using one around the time he formed Rainbow?

[Hardrock69]

Note that it has a 4-bolt neck. See, Fender has learned from their mistake.....that mistake being selling Strats in the 70s with a shitty 3-bolt neck and putting a fancy name on it like "Micro-Tilt" to try to hide the fact it is a design flaw.

[jhale667]

Hmmm... not sure about the fingerboard scalloping timeline, but if it were a true Blackmore tribute wouldn't the middle pickup be gone? :confused:

[ELVIS]

Note that it has a 4-bolt neck. See, Fender has learned from their mistake.....that mistake being selling Strats in the 70s with a shitty 3-bolt neck and putting a fancy name on it like "Micro-Tilt" to try to hide the fact it is a design flaw.

It wasn't a design flaw...

It was the shitty tolerances kept by the builders themselves...

A three bolt works fine if the neck fits the pocket...

[chefcraig]

Hmmm... not sure about the fingerboard scalloping timeline, but if it were a true Blackmore tribute wouldn't the middle pickup be gone? :confused:

Normally, he kept it intact but screwed it down so low that it would be useless and unobtrusive.

[jhale667]

Normally, he kept it intact but screwed it down so low that it would be useless and unobtrusive.

Thanks. After thinking about it, I remember at one point there was a sig model that had no middle pickup, but this is faithful to the era, I guess...

[Hardrock69]

It wasn't a design flaw...

It was the shitty tolerances kept by the builders themselves...

A three bolt works fine if the neck fits the pocket...

No it WAS a design flaw. A four-bolt neck would not have any problems, even if it were out of tolerance. Not only that, I played many 70s Strats were the neck fit into the pocket, but it would still have movement.

They should never have produced 3-bolt neck strats. That was probably why Ritchie Blackmore destroyed so many of them.

http://www.rockstarsguitars.com/rainbow/ritchie-blackmore/ritchie-blackmores-fender-stratocaster-headstock-from-cal-jam-1496/

http://www.rockstarsguitars.com/rainbow/ritchie-blackmore/ritchie-blackmores-1974-fender-stratocaster-1497/

When I saw Rainbow in 1982 in Kansas City, Blackmore had half-a-dozen maple-neck strats on stands on the stage....all with broken necks.

And then he broke another guitar that day.

He said in an interview in the late-70s in Guitar Player magazines that maple-neck Strats deserved to be broken.

[Coyote]

a vintage-style synchronized tremolo equipped with Blackmore’s distinctive custom ¼” arm

Odd, I remember seeing an old video of Uli Jon Roth with a similar trem arm...

*edit* Well, here's a shot...

[Hardrock69]

My best friend used to be particularly abusive on his whammy bars. He finally got tired of buying replacements, so he went to a machine shop and had a custom bar made out of 1/4" tempered steel rod. It never broke again.

[chefcraig]

My best friend used to be particularly abusive on his whammy bars. He finally got tired of buying replacements, so he went to a machine shop and had a custom bar made out of 1/4" tempered steel rod. It never broke again.

I had one made up by the machine shop that did most of our work at the auto parts store where I worked at the time, going so far as tur have some bends put into it to accommodate it's extra length. Naturally, I had a brass nut installed as well, but I never quite got used to having 3-In-1 oil dripping all over my hands and the guitar neck. I had a locking trem for about a month, yet I got tired of misplacing that annoying little allen wrench, so I wound up doing away with the vibrato bar altogether and going back to the standard nut.

Hell, at one point I removed the neck, cut out a rectangular piece of bicycle inner tube, and placed it between the neck and base. By not tightening the neck bolts all the way, I turned the entire neck into a vibrato bar.

I DO NOT recommend this for expensive axes, but if you have an old Squire hunk of shit laying around, it works just fine.

[ashstralia]

this...



Andy_Pipkin_by_michelleion.jpg

[ELVIS]

No it WAS a design flaw. A four-bolt neck would not have any problems, even if it were out of tolerance.

That's bullshit...

Four-bolt necks can suffer the same neck movement problems as a three-bolt...

The fix is something like this...

[sadaist]

I am & always have been a hack player. Got a Hondo back in the 80's & had my Scorpions, Judas Priest, AC/DC, tablature books like everyone else. A few simpler songs I could actually mimic fairly well (to my ear). Anyways, I consider myself like the majority of guys with a guitar and you hardcore players are more the exception.

I see this guitar here and to me it looks like the other 100 hanging on every wall of every guitar store or pawn shop. The only thing that lets me know anything about it's quality is the headstock says Fender Stratocaster. So how is it so much better than the ones that look identical starting at $79 and say Squire instead?

Can you explain without some crap about how the wood is grown in some impossible to get to island near Fiji from a tree grown in volcanic soil & watered with the tears of virgins, and the pearl inlays are taken from the regal thorny oyster of south east asia or some crap like that.


Looks pretty much the same as this to me....