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On Feb 15, 9:56 am, "Eisboch" wrote:


Turns out, there's an interesting story behind the "Blackie" model.

Eisboch

Well? Get another cup of coffee and start frekin' typing..



Ok. Here's what I've garnered from searching around on the Web and from
information directly from the Fender website.

Early in his career, Eric Clapton happened to stop in at a music store and
found several used Fender guitars for sale for something like 100 bucks
each. He bought them all, took them home and built a custom guitar using
parts from the various $100 guitars. He modified the shape of the body to
his liking and installed some "hot" pickups that he preferred. After it was
finished, he painted it with black lacquer and named it "Blackie".

He used "Blackie" for many years as he became successful and famous, both
for recording of albums and in live concerts. Sometime in the late 80's it
had become very beat up. The paint was worn and chipping away, it had
cigarette burns on the headstock and looked a mess. He officially "retired"
it, although he still used it occasionally for concert performances.

Years later, Fender contacted him about doing a special, custom built
replica of it. Clapton agreed and sent them the original Blackie. Fender
built 224, custom built Strats, exactly like the worn original. They
duplicated the chipped and worn paint and even the cigarette burns. All 224
of them were sold for $24,000 each. None are currently available for sale
anywhere that I could find on the 'Net.

After that, Fender and Clapton agreed to introduce a new line of production
Strats, based basically on the original Blackie design, but with more modern
pickups, etc. It was introduced as the Eric Clapton Artist "Blackie"
version of the Fender Stratocaster. The one I bought is one of these.
There's a little bit of discontinuity in that the current version uses
Vintage Noiseless Pickups and a pre-amp with a special tone control called
"The Clapton Circuit". Mine has Lace Sensor pickups, but also has the
"Clapton Circuit". It's basically a dual pot setup on the middle tone
control with a detent position at the "5" setting. It acts like a regular,
full range tone control from 0 to 5 and then the "Clapton" sound kicks in
from 5 to 10. The preamp also produces a 25db gain in the midrange, making
it very "hot" compared to a regular, passive electric. This was done in an
attempt to as faithfully as possible reproduce the sound of the original
"Blackie" that Clapton built.

Eisboch