Guitarist for Slipknot and Stone Sour, Jim Root, now has a signature Fender Stratocaster, designed with the harder-rocking guitarist in mind.
It’s a great-looking guitar that partially harkens back to Fender’s HM Strat days, although the addition of a larger 70’s –style headstock adds an air of authenticity to this model. All of the hardware is black and includes locking machine heads, which in all honesty didn’t appear to improve the accuracy of the tuning much more than standard machine heads. The guitar is available in two colours: flat black or flat white.
The neck feels great and is easy to get around on, providing a good sonic balance between chords and single notes. For some reason the three-way pickup switch doesn’t appear to offer the same range of tonal variations available on similarly wired instruments. Sonically the guitar seems to sit closer to the tonal range one would expect for classic rock rather than modern heavier styles.
Fitted with an EMG 81 Humbucker in the bridge position and an EMG 60 in the neck position, you’d expect a fairly full-on attack. Yet this is a frustrating guitar in the sense that it’s almost a great all-rounder. What holds it back is the inability to get a truly clean tone happening, as well as the surprising fact that it isn’t a particularly aggressive-sounding guitar either. So where the sacrificing of one extreme usually leads to an advantage in the other, this model oddly enough sits somewhere in the middle.
The Fender Jim Root Stratocaster retails for $2799.
CHRIS GIBBS
Reviewed at Mega Music Wangara
