Hey all, good to be back....you may have noticed I've made a couple of odd posts lately but I thought I'd let you know I'm having a cool time at uni and feeling great to be alive :cool: Last night I played guitar infront of an audience for the first time in over 3 years and hell have I missed it! It was just an open-stage nite, so I got myself the first drummer I could find, hammered out some zepp riffs and improvised loads......such fun! (although class with a hangover this morning wasn't so cool :D

Anyway, to the point, If anyone here plays a strat, I wanna know about your gear coz I'm seriously considering selling off some of my beginner-gear like my squire and practice amp and replacing them with a quality strat. As my budget isn't infinite I looked at some of the mexican models in the local guitar store, (which is a gift from God....it's got so much cool stuff! I have to force myself not to get my credit card out every time I walk in), and they play quite well on the surface, how reliable are they? Good value for money?

I find the maple fretboards suit me best on starts but have heard people say that they have a habit of making the strings stick.....any truth there? Plus I'm not sure about the tuning stability, my style has a lot of string bending and I'm a bit heavy handed on vibrato.....worth sticking with standard strat machine heads or does anyone use a different make with their strat?

If you want to know the kind of tone I'm looking for I'm into the sort of sounds Robben Ford and Eric Johnson get from strats.

Anyway, time to catch up on my sleep. Cya, Chacron.