New Fender American Deluxe HSH

[Deleted]

www.fender.com/en-GR/guitars/stratocaster/american-deluxe-stratocaster-hsh-rosewood-fingerboard-olympic-pearl/





Its getting mean!

Also notice the difference in wiring between SSS/HSS and this one, no S1-switching, no "pass through" button. Mean!! just mean!

[Deleted]

If only there was a maple fretboard version. Why would they stick to rosewood ?

[newey]

If only there was a maple fretboard version. Why would they stick to rosewood ?

Just a guess here, but it's probably simply for aesthetics, to match with the white or black-burst body color. Over the years, Fender has often made certain colors available with the rosewood board only, while other body colors got the maple.

Of course, one of the nice things about owning a Strat is the interchangeability of parts. You want a maple fretboard? Buy a maple-on-maple neck off EBay and bolt it on, then sell off the rosewood one to recoup some (or all) of the cost.

[Deleted]

Sure, its just that some old folks like me have that Hendrix/Malmsteen white body/maple fretboard image implanted in their heads. That said, i find the silverburst very nice looking.

[JohnH]

Interesting how they have got all these humbucking humbuckers and noiseless single, then go and split the humbuckers when they combine it with middle in positions 2 and 4. Potentially causing more noise than a Squier Bullet!

First person to see one in a guitar shop, plug it in with some gain and see if it hums at 2 and 4.

Or maybe they are clever and can bypass the noise-cancelling coil on M.?

[newey]

John-

Interesting how they have got all these humbucking humbuckers and noiseless single, then go and split the humbuckers when they combine it with middle in positions 2 and 4. Potentially causing more noise than a Squier Bullet!

First person to see one in a guitar shop, plug it in with some gain and see if it hums at 2 and 4.

Or maybe they are clever and can bypass the noise-cancelling coil on M.?

According to Fender's specs, it's at 2 and 3, not 2 and 4. Note that there is no "middle alone" option. Obviously using a Superswitch, given Fender's description:

Pickup Switching: 5-Position Blade: Pos 1. Bridge Humbucking Pickup; Pos 2. Middle Pickup and Outer Coil of Bridge Pickup; Pos 3. Middle Pickup and Outer Coil of Neck Humbucking Pickup; Pos 4. Neck and Middle Pickup; Pos 5. Neck Humbucking Pickup

But why should this be "potentially noisier than a Squier Bullet"? We have a noiseless middle, with one non-sensing dummy coil to reduce the hum of the middle single, in parallel with a single bridge or neck coil. It shouldn't be any noisier than a single coil by itself, I would think.

In the past, we have said that this sort of three-coil arrangement was "partially hum-cancelling". Why would this be any different? It's still 3 coils, with the 2 middle coils (presumably)being RWRP with respect to each other. The third coil, split from one HB, will likewise be RWRP with one of the two middle coils.

[sumgai]

While we usually deal with equal coil parameters in a Humbucker, and thus when combining such a beast with a single-coil pup and ending up with a three-coil conglomeration that only partially cancels hum, there's no Cast-In-Stone Rule-Of-Law requiring such. Indeed, Fender has gone out of its way to use a non-linear hum-sensing coil that is all but deaf to the strings. (I wonder how Kinman is gonna react to this one, as he's been doing this for years.) In terms of inductance, reactance, impedance and other parameters, the sensing coil should just about be "swamped" by the other two coils, and thus ignorable in any calculations of such. I'm guessing that those two other coils match pretty closely, which of course is what we'd want, in order to reduce/eliminate audible hum from the outgoing signal.

According to the reviews I found on the web, the N3 is pretty much noise-free no matter what the environment. OTOH, only a portion of the reviewers made positive remarks about the tone. I'd say that slighly more than half of them came down on the negative side, tone-wise.

HTH



sumgai

[Deleted]

Another interesting addition is the bridge tone control :

Controls: Master Volume, Tone 1. (Neck/Middle Pickups), Tone 2. (Bridge Pickup)

another shift towards non-traditional.
Well, deja-vu, but nice additions nevertheless. I think the fact that they made the wiring more simple than SSS/HSS equivalents,
as well as the choice of colors and woods, makes me think this new one targets a more "heavy" market share.
Something to compete against Gibson (Les Paul Signature T, Traditional Pro II), or in the PRS range.
It is interesting that there are no reviews about this model, although it is all over in stores over the web, maybe it is too new.

[JohnH]

My thought about hum was that, with all hum-cancelling and noiseless pickups, a buyer of such a premium guitar might expect it all to be quiet, in each of the 5 settings offered. But two of the five seem like they may have hum. Not excesively, but enough to be a problem for the high-gain players that this might appeal to. The settings affected being M plus a B of N single, can be dead quiet on a normal Strat with simple single coils.

If they offered standard strat wiring, then all settings could have been quiet with those pickups.

[Deleted]

Oct 11, 2013 1:06:56 GMT -5 JohnH said:

If they offered standard strat wiring, then all settings could have been quiet with those pickups.

I agree (maybe the original quack would suffer) or making the middle one true SC, and split coils in 2,4 like those dimarzio Velvets found in the middle position on so many HSH Ibanez's.
Now, i had an idea, what if there are hidden coils underneath those new twin humbucking pups so that they can function noiseless either in split mode or full humbucking mode, just like an EMG 89? Far fetched i know, just saying...

[newey]

Another interesting addition is the bridge tone control :
Controls: Master Volume, Tone 1. (Neck/Middle Pickups), Tone 2. (Bridge Pickup)

another shift towards non-traditional.

People were filing notches in their 3-way switches for 15 years or so before Fender made the 5-way switch standard. People have been moving the tone control to the bridge pickup on Strats for over 50 years, and now Fender jumps on the bandwagon (OK, they may have done it before this on Custom Shop models, but you get the point . . ).

But it's curious how they've done it here. The usual way is to move the tone control from the mid to the bridge pup, leaving the mid pup without a tone control. This way, there is never a situation where both controls are in the circuit at once, and you don't get the interaction of the two tone controls like you have at position 4 (N + M) on a regular Strat.

With this guitar, however, a middle tone is even less important, since the mid is never on by itself- but Fender now makes the other tone neck/middle, so we're back to the interaction, this time in position 2!

And that rather odd HSH wiring on the 5-way- didn't we have something very similar to that here a while back?

Back when ChrisK was alive, he kept a close eye on who was lurking around here. He had the ability to track IP addresses down to the actual servers, not just to the city or region(which is all that I check). He would PM me fairly regularly with notes to the effect that so-and-so had registered here and was using Fender's Corona CA server, or occasionally Gibson's server (As I recall, Fender and Gretsch guys were the most regular visitors, Gibson less so). This was why Chris always put a copyright designation on his diagrams, just in case one of his ideas should become the Next Big Thing . . .

Don't think for a moment that the corporate design and engineering types aren't paying attention to ideas presented here. They were watching back then, they no doubt still are . . .