You ever have one of those times where you just bought a guitar for NO real reason? Well here’s mine! This is a NYP “Start clone” whopping $99 delivered. I Justified it in my own mind as being the tool that I would use to determine if I REALLY wanted a strat or not (I knew I did!). So this thng arrives and surprise surprise the pups blow. The NECK on the other hand. WOW the neck was worth $99.

 So I played around with it for a while, I just felt that I couldn’t REALLY get the full feel of a strat w/ those pickups. So I started looking around. Somewhere along the line (don’t you LOVE those?) I came across a set of blade pickups, I had pne already pegged for another project so I figured I’d put the other one in the tail of this thinkg. It DEFINITELY improved the sound!

 Then for the MID , I used an actual Fender MIA mid single coil, and wow that REALLY tightened things up! SO after all this I KNEW I’d have to raise the bar to make the neck pup something special. Well my FAVORITE mom and pop went out of business, and during his liquidation sail he had  marked down a Brian May pickup to $47, I KNEW I had to have it (even if I had NO idea WHAT that would sound like).

 Well when all was said and done I had one UGLY guitar (the pickguard didn’t fare very well in all this), and the paint had gotten a little scarred up in the process as well (some solder drips), but the SOUND! Wow. It became the standard by which every other strat that I played was measured by.

 Now I KNOW that fender never made ANYTHING this strange, but when I went out strat hunting I wanted THIS particular clean tone, the one produced by this $99 special. THAT may have been why it took me SO long to find the MIA that I wanted.

(look HERE for that story http://www.thehess.org/miastrat.html)

But I DID find the MIA Iwanted, and as of yet the NYP is still in the same shape it always has been.

 But soon, very soon (before my sons college graduation) I will make this an “Art Strat) that my wife WILL le in the main part of the house, and then I’ll have some REALLY great toys inside!.

 Just as an FYI, prior to this I had a FULL Hollow Jass Box that was a NYP that had an AMAZING tone both acoustically and plugged in. But like most things, when someone offers me more than TWICE what I paid for it, I’m willing to let it go! I kept SAYING that it was an ES137 cloe, but this thing really WAS an original. Even though I left it stock, the guy I sold it to, ended up unboxing it, re-stringing it on the way to a gig and then jumping on stage with it. So if you ever see a really strange looking full hollow don’t be afraid of NYP< and more importantly, hope that you get there before I do, because I REALLY want one back!