Amazing deluxe American Stratocaster with all the deluxe features a serious player needs. This is the ultimate Stratocaster.

A High Performance Strat

The American Deluxe was created to meet the demand for higher performance. Players had long been changing the pickups in their Stratocasters to get less noise. Fender had been using the Lace Sensor pickups in the Strat Plus line for just that reason. The American Deluxe featured the newly designed Vintage Noiseless Strat pickups. It had 3 Vintage Noiseless pickups (neck/middle/bridge). The switching for this guitar was handled by the standard Fender 5-position blade switch. Absent from this guitar was the S-1 Switching system which would be introduced in the 2004-2009 series American Deluxe Stratocaster.

Back To Original Body Shape

For the Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster Fender went back to the original design drawings of the 1950’s and found that the Stratocaster’s body shape had gradually “wandered” a bit from the original Strat. To fix that issue they set all the CNC machines to make the contours of the body more like the Stratocaster of the 50’s.

New Neck

The new neck featured a very comfortable shape with some nice enhancements. It had the new “rolled” neck edges that smoothed out the joint between the neck and fingerboard giving the guitar a well-played feel along the edges of the neck where the thumb and fingers wrap around. The neck was maple with a modern C-shape neck and a maple fingerboard. It has a 9.5″ radius and a satin polyurethane finish on the neck to enhance the smooth feel of the neck. The width at the nut was 1.68750″ (43mm). The neck had mother of pearl abalone dot position inlays and highly detailed fret and nut work.

Bridge

The bridge was the high performance Fender Deluxe 2-Point Synchronized Tremolo with a pop-in arm as opposed to the screw-in arm found on the Strat Plus line. This high performance tremolo unit kept the guitar in tune much better than the vintage tremolo. It doesn’t handle dive bombing and whammy bar theatrics as well as a Floyd Rose but it keeps Jeff Beck’s Stratocaster in tune so it’s a good, proven unit.

Transparent Finishes

The 1998-2003 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster series featured beautiful transparent finishes. To enhance the appearance of the transparent finish they selected higher grade alder and ash wood. Therefore the bodies were created with fewer glued-together pieces of wood. This was because you could see the wood grain so well with the transparent finish. In addition they began to match finish colors to the wood. The color red is a fabulous match to the natural color of alder wood. Teal green is a color that perfectly compliments the natural color of ash wood.

1998 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster Teal Green shown with caseLocking Tuners

The guitar featured Fender Schaller deluxe staggered cast and sealed locking tuning machines. The staggered heads eliminated the need for two string trees. The string tree is notorious for introducing friction and drag to the strings. Friction drag causes tuning issues when using the tremolo. The single string tree used on the American Deluxe Stratocaster was a round string tree which caused much less friction than the flat string tree found on older Strats. A little lubricant on this chrome string tree makes it pretty much frictionless. The locking tuners combined with the new string tree and 2-point synchronized tremolo help the American Deluxe Stratocaster to stay in tune incredibly well.