Steve's Gear & Music Blog: Project "Mystic Blue Strat": Step 1

So.. I got the bug again and wanted to get a new Strat - I had been looking at some online vendors like Sweetwater to get an idea of what was out there and one guitar that really stood out to me was the American Standard in Mystic Blue. It's a rich blue color with some metallic to it.. very sharp looking! It came in the 'usual' options of SSS or HSS configurations with the Single Coils being 'Fat 50's' and either a rosewood or maple neck (yes.. fretboard.. just like technically it's vibrato not tremolo..) and they actually BOTH looked very good to me!

I wanted to do more of a 'hot-rod' kind of Strat so I knew I was going to change out any pickups that would come with it for something way hotter. Also for the neck, I didn't really want the standard US neck with the 'Modern C' profile and 9.5" radius. I really wanted a compound radius, and preferably a 'V' shape, but I did NOT want a vintage tint this time like I ended up with my tungsten build. This would probably mean to get the compound radius I would have to settle for the modern 'C' shape anyway, since the only compound-V's out there are from the deluxe series and they come pre-tinted. Based on these criteria I knew it'd be a waste to buy a whole stock guitar.

I started making some mock-ups in photoshop for how I wanted the guitar to look. I knew I was going to go with a black pickguard/pickups (as always right) , I just wasn't sure which ones. Previously I had looked at the Dimarzio Paul Gilbert pickups: The Injectors. This time I was looking at all their Hum-Cancelling Single Coils, especially the ones that came in a pre-wired pickguard. While it wasn't a 1-ply pickguard like I prefer, I figured it would at least be an easy way to drop in some new pickups. I basically was stuck between going with Injectors or the 'High Output' Set that held some FastTrack/ProTrack pickups that were blade-style. In the end I started leaning to the Fast tracks, so I dropped them in to the picture and came up with these 2 designs, depending on fretboard material since I still haven't decided if I'm going rosewood or maple. (Shocker I know!)

Concept 1 - Mystic Blue, Black Pickguard, Rosewood

Concept 2 - Mystic Blue, Black Pickguard, Maple

So to start this project I started looking at what I call my 'goto' place for Strat parts: The Stratosphere on Ebay. From what I've been able to gather in online discussions they actually buy new guitars and part them out. Some people take issue with this, but for people like me who like to 'combine' bits and pieces from different models etc it's a great way to get what you want. Yes their pricing isn't always (or usually) the cheapest, but it gets me what I want. I just keep an eye on when they have 10% off deals for the items I want which helps a great deal.

I noticed they had both 'bare' bodies (just the painted body with no hardware) for sale, and loaded bodies (just add a neck and strings and you're done!) in Mystic Blue. I had just missed a 10% discount on the loaded body so I started to add up all the parts for a bare body in Mystic blue to see what the cost would be for that. Adding in the Jack, The Tremolo system etc came literally within 20 bucks of the loaded body if I could get the discount and that would include the Fat 50's pickups! With that kind of math I figured that I could always put the pickups in my other Black Strat in case I get tired of the Texas-Specials in there. So the waiting game began for the discount to hopefully re-appear, and have no-one else buy it meanwhile.. luckily for me within a couple of weeks the loaded body went on special again and I immediately purchased it.