Finding the Perfect Kit

After asking "Why", the next question is naturally "What kind?" I've already established that the guitar is going to be an electric, but what is it going to look like? What is the guitar model? There are lots of pretty guitars out there with lots of famous names attached to them: Gibson, Fender, and Ibanez to name a few. But to me, this question had been answered even before I fully figured out the why. It absolutely had to be a Fender Stratocaster.

Mm, Girl look at that body.

For those that don't know, the 'Strat' may be the most iconic guitar shape ever conceived. Designed in 1954, it's been used by a plethora of guitarists since then, including Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, John Mayer, and Corey Richardson. The list itself even has its own Wikipedia page. Clapton played his signature Stratocaster, known as 'Blackie" for nearly 20 years! When he auctioned it off for charity, it sold for almost one million dollars. To put that in perspective, you could take that money and buy one million orders of chicken nuggets at McDonald's. Or about one gallon of gas. ^{[Citation Needed]}

To me, the Stratocaster was the best. Its sound, feel, and comfort were unparalleled to the other guitars that I've tried. The way it fits so snugly to my waist as I play can only be described as like wearing a snuggie made from beautiful, soft, sound waves. Pure. Bliss. So of course, the kit I was looking for was for a Stratocaster.

On my last post, I mentioned that I found some corner of the web beyond Amazon where one could purchase guitar parts and kits. To be honest, I found quite a few, but only two of them really caught my interest; the rest of them looked like those poorly designed web pages from the 90s with flashing text and outrageous font colors.

The first website of interest belonged to Ed Roman Guitars. It's a small company in Las Vegas that specialized in making custom guitars. This seemed like a promising start, since they had a giant collection of custom made guitars and even a section dedicated to their guitar kits. It even promised that its guitar kits  were of higher quality than anywhere else on the web. A bit cocky, but maybe that's what was needed to distinguish itself from the rest of its peers in this niche market. The wise thing to do though would be searching for external reviews on the site itself.

And how wise a decision it was. On some independent guitar forums, Ed Roman was generally regarded as somewhat of a prick and rather snooty when it came to guitars. Apparently his staff would also make it policy to push their expensive custom made guitars on their customers. This may just be the vocal minority and hearsay, and Mr. Roman may be the misunderstood saint of custom made guitars, but I decided to trust in the external opinions and search elsewhere.

The other option was BYOGuitar (the BYO meaning Build-Your-Own). I stumbled upon it on a recommendation from another forum. Another adventurous soul undertook a project similar to mine and had purchased a guitar kit from them as well; his review was positive and other customers of the site also echoed his sentiment. And happily, they have the Stratocaster kit that I so badly wanted.

As a bonus, there was a lot of customization one could add to the kit. You can change the lineup of pickups and swap out a Single Coil for a Humbucker (I'll go over these in a later post). You even had a few options on the type of wood the neck and body would be made of. A few clicks later, and the order had been placed. I decided to even pay an extra $13 to have it flown, rather than driven. I wasn't comfortable with the unfinished guitar bouncing around in the back of a Semi while being driven across the country.

And now, we wait. Or do we? Painting a guitar is probably the hardest task awaiting me... but that's another post.

Thanks for reading!