Seven decades since it rolled off the production line in Fullerton, California – and whatever your personal tastes – you’d have to agree that Leo Fender’s deathless doublecut is the quintessential electric guitar.
It’s the shape a kid would draw if you handed them a crayon. It’s the model you’d show to a visiting glow-fingered alien curious about humanoid rock ‘n’ roll.
To sling a Strat is to experience the ultimate collision of tone and ergonomics.
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Respect to the Telecaster (born three years earlier, in 1951), but it’s a caveman’s club next to Leo’s next great lightbulb moment.
Sleek as a surfboard, contoured to the body like a well-cut suit, with stellar access and the first bulletproof tremolo system. Sonically unique, with an unmistakable singlecoil ‘cluck’ that could be fattened, starved, or stacked via a cluster of idiot-proof dials and a five-way selector (from the mid-’70s on).
Back then, in 1954, the Strat seemed to come from the future, and even now, if you pause and consider it afresh, it still does.
But the Fender Stratocaster would just be a glorified carpentry project without the players who danced across its neck and gave it life. Here we celebrate 25 of the very best Strat-o-masters, from the worlds of blues, rock, funk, disco, prog, shred, grunge, metal, and beyond.
Buddy Holly
It’s December 1, 1957. Buddy Holly is performing That’ll Be The Day on his Ed Sullivan Show debut, and the great American public is seeing the Fender Stratocaster in action for the first time.
He might look like a librarian on uppers, but the Texan bandleader’s piston-pump rhythm work is not to be sniffed at, and to a generation that has known nothing but horn bands, that hard, biting jangle is a clarion call announcing that things will be different from now on.
Jimi Hendrix
Admittedly, the defining image of the Strat’s greatest Sixties ambassador sees him torching the damn thing onstage at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. But the instrument’s real pyrotechnics happened before Jimi lit the match.
Exploring the outer limits of its mischief-ready sonic scope and easily abused tremolo, he couldn’t have conjured the same black-magic cacophony – or the beauty of Little Wing – from any other model. Jimi’s trademark flip ‘n’ restring, meanwhile, was an audio-visual WTF that only cemented the impression he’d just stepped off a spaceship into Swinging London.
Hank Marvin
You Americans don’t know how lucky you are. It wasn’t until 1959 – a full five years after US production began – that Shadows bandleader Cliff Richard bought and gifted to his guitarist what is believed to be the first Strat on British shores (a Fiesta Red stunner with gold hardware). Those gorgeous, glassy, plaintive melodies on Apache and Wonderful Land wouldn’t have shimmered the same on anything else.
Jeff Beck
Sure, a Telecaster (in the Yardbirds) and Les Paul (on Blow By Blow) were fine for the punch-your-lights-out early stuff. But when Beck really found his voice and fell into his signature techniques – the volume swells and whale-song whammy tickles, exemplified by Where Were You – only the Fender doublecut could get the job done.
“What is it about the Strat that I love so much?” he mused in an interview with Malcolm Gerrie of Sky Arts. “Its endless color…”
Eric Clapton
Like Beck, EC played ’em all, from his Yardbirds Tele, through the revved-up Les Paul of the Bluesbreakers, to the SG-fueled ‘woman’ tone showcased on Cream’s Disraeli Gears. But like so many Sixties galacticos, as the decade turned, he was drawn to the Strat, retooling a clutch of second-hand models bought from a Nashville music store into the fabled Blackie mongrel that drove everything from Cocaine to Wonderful Tonight.
“I felt like Blackie had become part of me,” Clapton once told Guitar Player. “A guitar like that comes along maybe once in a lifetime.”
David Gilmour
Compared to his ’70s-gunslinger peers, the Pink Floyd man didn’t play too many notes. But the sweetness of his phrasing, twinned with the haunting, bell-like quality of his ’69 Black Strat, meant each one was a symphony (revisit the shivering four-note starburst of Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part II).
That Black Strat was just recently auctioned from the private collection of late Indianapolis Colts boss Jim Irsay for $14.5 million, making it officially the world’s most valuable guitar.
Stevie Ray Vaughan
The Texas bluesman picked up his early-’60s Strat – known as both Number One and First Wife – from an Austin music store in 1974. As a man who played so hard he had to perform DIY on his own tattered fingers, the instrument probably deserved its retirement in 1990 – while SRV’s tragic death that August meant he never saw Fender’s signature replica launch two years later at NAMM.
Ritchie Blackmore
Deep Purple’s dark wizard got his wings on a Gibson ES-335, but a fateful 1969 encounter with Eric Clapton’s roadie changed everything (“He brought a Strat, so I said to him, ‘Do you want to sell that guitar?’”).
In a 2024 GW interview, Blackmore told us he tracked Smoke On The Water on a mongrel, before summing up the Strat’s pragmatic magic: “It’s a way of paying the bills. It also happens to be an incredible guitar.”
Nile Rodgers
Just for a moment, consider how many unfathomable millions of dollars must have flowed through the Chic legend’s ‘Hitmaker’ Strat.
Seeing action with everyone from David Bowie to Madonna, the sonic character of its unusually light alder body is perfect for Rodgers’ muted hits and zingy chord fragments. But he might never have picked it up from a Miami pawn shop in ’73 were it not for the curt advice of wingman/bassist Bernard Edwards (“Get a Strat, motherf***er!”)
Yngwie Malmsteen
Before the Scandi shredder broke out with 1984’s Rising Force, ‘scallops’ were something you gagged on at posh dinner parties.
Inspired by a 16th century lute with carved-out frets, Malmsteen recalled that “people thought I was crazy” when they saw his teenage handiwork. But there was no arguing with the added velocity of scalloping, which made this already-lightning-fast player even speedier, like strapping rockets on Usain Bolt’s sneakers. Only Clapton was offered a Fender signature Strat before him (but Malmsteen’s ’88 model was the first to feature his signature on the headstock).
Dave Murray and Janick Gers
Given all that demon iconography, you’d expect Iron Maiden’s three-guitar frontline to reach for something macabre from the B.C. Rich brochure. In fact, the British metallers’ gallop is largely underpinned by a pair of workhorse Strats, with Janick Gers favoring a Seymour Duncan JB JR-bolstered model and Dave Murray driving a pair of Hot Rails (Adrian Smith is more of a dabbler, mostly wedded to his Jackson San Dimas).
Tom DeLonge
The Blink-182 man has bounced between Fender and Gibson his whole career, and lately seems sworn to his signature Starcaster. But after retiring the iconic early “Sticker Strat”, the Enema Of The State period saw DeLonge punch out parts like All The Small Things on a pastel-hued Custom Shop Strat with a lonely Seymour Duncan Invader bridge ’bucker (it was released in 2001 as a production guitar).
Albert Hammond Jr
Beset by bowel-tuned nu-metal, it felt like we hadn’t seen a Strat in years when The Strokes broke out with 2001’s Is This It.
While Nick Valensi was all studied cool on an Epiphone Riviera, his corkscrew-curled wingman hammered thrillingly at a high-strapped 1985 reissue of a ’72 Strat (that instrument was also behind the feral, Freddie King-inspired solo on Last Nite).
Billy Corgan
Alt-rock will forever be associated with a sticker-coated Jazzmaster, but look closer and the Strat appeared in the hands of everyone from Kurt Cobain (at the ’92 Reading Festival) to Mike McCready (the out-of-phase shimmer on Yellow Ledbetter). Amongst these, Corgan was arguably the greatest virtuoso and most committed Strat-o-phile.
In his words, the Smashing Pumpkins leader “walked into a Guitar Center one day and, off the wall, bought an Eric Clapton ’57 reissue. That became the main guitar for Siamese and Mellon Collie, and launched a thousand ships of people chasing that sound.”
Mark Knopfler
Before he settled back into the molten Les Paul solos of Brothers In Arms, the Dire Straits leader was the fastest gun on London’s post-punk scene, revered for the quicksilver bob ‘n’ weave outro to 1978’s Sultans Of Swing.
Tellingly, the red ’61 he played it on (supposedly something of a partscaster) was one of the few models that Knopfler chose to ring-fence from his 2024 guitar auction.
Bonnie Raitt
The Californian slide goddess and 13-time Grammy winner picked up her first Strat on the street following a 1969 gig – immediately falling for the often-neglected third position. “It’s all about that middle pickup,” says Raitt. “You just can’t beat it.”
Eric Johnson
The Cliffs Of Dover virtuoso could easily have followed his G3 brethren into an Ibanez endorsement. But Johnson is a Strat diehard with a very specific wishlist, insisting that models from ’54, ’57, and ’58 are best (“I think Fender had a shipment of wood that was real special”) and adding an offbeat f-hole to his 2018 signature thinline.
Cory Wong
Funk belongs on a Strat – don’t argue – and Wong’s kinetic grooves with Vulfpeck have moved more feet than anyone on the modern scene. He’s proved price isn’t everything with his dedication to his teenage Highway One model – also the inspiration for his 2021 signature model – and should really be taking a salary as Fender brand ambassador.
Wong was led to the aforementioned Highway One Strat by his father, who – Wong said in a 2023 Guitar World interview – told him, “‘Listen! You love the Chili Peppers, you love Stevie Ray Vaughan. Look at Jeff Beck, look at Jimi Hendrix, look at Stevie Ray and Eric Johnson.’ He gave me this lineage of the Stratocaster and basically said: Look at all the things this guitar is capable of.’”
H.E.R.
The Strat’s generation-leaping appeal is underlined by Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson, whose breakout 2021 album, Back Of My Mind, bends the backbone of vintage R&B into bold new shapes.
“The Strat is an iconic guitar, just because of the look and shape,” says the 28-year-old Californian (who got her own signature model in 2020). “But the tone, the heaviness… to me, it’s the unicorn. It’s classic, but it’s new at the same time.”
Rory Gallagher
Bought on credit in 1963, and beaten like a dog through the ’70s and ’80s, the Irishman’s ’61 looked set for a quiet retirement. Instead, it now enjoys an afterlife as a blues-rock Excalibur, loaned out to wide-eyed fanboys like Joe Bonamassa.
“I’m thinking, ‘I’m gonna take so much shit for this’,” recalled the US bluesman of test-driving Rory’s doublecut at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2011. “Because everyone on the Internet will go, ‘Who do you think you are?’ But anybody would have done it…”
The Edge
U2’s sonic maverick has built up quite a rack since 1980’s Boy (you could argue he’s equally associated with the Explorer). But hands-down the most neck-tingling moment of any show is the delay-drenched jewelry box tinkle of Where The Streets Have No Name, and for that, a Strat on the middle pickup is non-negotiable.
Mdou Moctar
If your first guitar had been built from driftwood, bicycle cables, and the keys used to open sardine tins, you’d be glad to get on a Strat too. The desert-blues figurehead’s only stipulation is that the strings on his American Professional left-hander are at least two years old.
Steve Lacy
Every time you think you’ve got the Strat all figured out, a twenty-something gunslinger comes along and flips it on its head.
Take the Californian alt-R&B phenom, who splits his licks between solo work, The Internet, and a billion guest-spots with everyone from Vampire Weekend to Tyler, The Creator. Then there’s Lacy’s rulebook-shredding People Pleaser signature Strat – complete with an onboard fuzz circuit.
Ry Cooder
There’s a case that the Californian slide man barely qualifies as a Strat player. His trademark ‘Coodercasters’, after all, are so heavily modded that Leo Fender would barely recognize them as his children. But Cooder demands inclusion for his beyond-spellbinding, desert-baked, and dust-blown tone.
Buddy Guy
When the great Louisiana bluesman headed north in ’57, he assured his ailing mother he’d return from Chicago at the wheel of a polka-dot Cadillac. Guy couldn’t keep that promise, but made amends by commissioning his spotted Fender signature model.
He’s never strayed from the Strat, and even on the brink of his nineties, used it to dig out a gorgeous fingerstyle blues in the credits scene of last year’s Oscar-winning Sinners.
