Brenda is a lightweight (7 lbs) hardtail that will satisfy your thirst for vintage tones, with a surprising array of tonesets. With some modern improvements, she's also extremely playable--you won't want to put her back down!

She has a surprisingly lightweight (less than 4 lbs) solid mahogany body, which is a great start to playability, and a great tonewood as well.

I left the pickups naked because they're really nice looking, and I didn't want to hide them.  If you must have pickup covers, I'll put some on at your request.  Your choice of colors, even.

Speaking of the pickups, Brenda is sporting a vintage wound set of GFS "59 Strat".  These pickups, in the right guitar, really live up to their name.  Many sounds of early 60's strats are right there at your fingertips.

Which leads us to the switching.  Instead of a 5 way switch, I used individual on/off switches.  Pickup selection is simply a flick of the thumb away.  It also allows you to use the neck and bridge pickups together (try it!), as well as all three together (pretty muddy).  250K CTS pots and a Sprague orange drop cap help preserve the vintage tones.

Then there's the bridge.  It's a Hipshot hardtail bridge, one of my favorites.  Definitely an excellent saddle design to preserve sustain and stabilize tuning.  Looks great, too.

The maple neck (by Warmoth) has a beautiful rosewood fretboard.  No fret markers to disturb the beauty of the wood.  It does have white side dots, though.

The neck width is 1 11/16" at the nut, 2" at the 12th fret.  It has a compound radius, 10-14".  It's .79" at the first fret, .84 at the 12th.  Much shreddier than an actual early 60's Strat.

The nut is graphite, also increasing tuning stability.  The tuners are Wilkinson EZ-Lok, which use the same locking design (2 string holes in each post) as some 60's guitars did.  You can even stagger them by choosing the upper or lower hole first.

Since she's a hardtail, I decided to go with a wooden (purpleheart wood dyed black to match) string retainer/mute.  Does a much better job of muting overtones and undertones than string trees, and covers all six strings.

That's Brenda!  She's one smooth player with one smooth voice!

Brenda--Smooth Stratstyle Hardtail-- A Premium Partscaster From Estes Electrostring!