I'm thinking of getting A Standard Strat by Fender. But what's the difference between the mexican made and the American? And sound-wise, what's the difference between the humbucker pickups and single coil? Thanks.
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Humbuckers tend to make less noise, they 'buck the hum' as it were. They also sound fatter, than the thinner sounding sing coils.
As I recall, they use different necks - the Mexican one has 21 frets, the American one 22.
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Unless you get a custom shop Strat, you'll never get one with a one piece body. The US Strats have fewer pieces (2-3, if I remember rightly), the MIM Strats have, generally, I seem to remember 3-5 pieces.
The switching is different. The USA Strats have a logical switching B, BM, M, MN, N with allocated tone controls T2, T2, T2, T2+T1, T1. The MIM Strats are similar, except that the bridge on it's own (B) has no tone control allocated - this is, as far as I can see, the vintage Strat wiring (the 50', 60's & 70's models all have the same wiring as MIMs). It's obviously pretty easily modified.
I happened to have been in my local guitar shop, yesterday, and played both an MIM and a MIA Strat - I was surprised by how little apparent difference there was between them.
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The one thing that always strikes me when I pick up an American Fender is the rolled edges on the neck. It is a subtle difference, but it makes for a very comfortable playing neck. It does seem a pretty large price increase for just this feature, though.
Single coils tend to sound bright, clean and crisp, sometimes twangy, but with a tendency to hum slightly, even when not being played, depending on what other electronics are on in the room and how good the ground is for the wires in the wall. While they can get a good overdrive out of an amp, they can also tend to give a fizzy distorted sound that may require a little work to get right.
Humbuckers get rid of most of the tendency to hum but with a tendency to loose the high frequency clarity and so can sometimes sound somewhere between mellow and muddy. The mellowness combined with a generally higher output makes humbuckers often easier to get a distorted sound out of an amp.
