squier strat

Squier 40th Anniversary Stratocaster Review

Luxe looks and a sweet playing feel make this Squier an anniversary edition worth celebrating.

Slinky playability. Very nice construction quality. An attractive, celebratory mash-up of Fender style elements.

Neck feels slightly generic.

$599

Squier 40th Anniversary Stratocaster
fender.com

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Premier Guitar doesn’t often review anniversary edition instruments—most of them being marketing exercises in disguise. But the Squier 40th Anniversary Stratocaster genuinely seems to embody much about where Squier has been and the reliable source for quality, affordable, and, yes, beautiful guitars they have become.

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Reader Guitar of the Month: Daphne Blue “1968” Stratocaster

Name: Mark Robinson

Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky

Guitar: Daphne Blue “1968” Stratocaster

Regretting that his 1968 “Hendrix” Strat got away, a guitarist decides to recreate it 50 years later.

It’s 1968 and I’m a 13-year-old Hendrix wannabe, like a thousand other teenage guitar players. In a pawnshop on Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina, hangs a brand new olympic white Stratocaster with a rosewood fretboard, oozing Hendrix vibe (many pawnshops were official Fender dealers back then). It hung there for a year, gaining a stain from the neck hanger which looked like the infamous burnt cigarette mark you see on some Strats. I worked an entire summer painting fences to earn the $300 it took to take that guitar home. (I worked the next summer to earn enough to buy a ’69 drip-edge Pro Reverb).

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