When someone pictures an electric guitar the typical Fender shape is the first to come to mind. Leo Fender began manufacturing the Fender Telecaster in 1950 with the Stratocaster following in 1954. Leo Fender was considered an engineering genius due to the specialized production methods he employed even though he didn’t play the guitar. The bolt-on neck and solid wood body design meant that they were cheaper to manufacture than their competition. This still holds true today as the prices on Fender’s high end guitars are about half of what Gibson’s Les Paul’s go for.
With each passing year since its release, the telecaster and Stratocaster have had slight modifications and tweaks to improve their design continuing to bring the guitar in to the modern age. But the iconic body shape and sound have always remained the same. Nothing sounds like a Stratocaster!
This leads us to Fender’s newest series for 2021, the Fender Ultra Luxe, the latest guitar in the “ultra” series. Outside of the custom shop this is their top of the line guitar with features giving Suhr and Tom Anderson guitars a run for their money.
With several all-new advanced features and eye-catching finishes, Ultra Luxe instruments are built for players demanding the ultimate in performance and tone. The Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster comes in two models with the differences being in the pickups and the Floid Rose tremolo system.
Today we will be discussing the Fender Ultra Luxe HSS model with the locking tremolo system. sporting a painted headstock, overwound noiseless pickups, an Original Floyd Rose Tremolo system, and stainless steel frets, let’s see if this guitar is the right axe for you.
Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster Floid Rose Features
Body Material: Alder
Body Finish: Gloss Urethane
Body Color: Silver Burst
Body Shape: Stratocaster
Neck Material: Maple
Neck Finish: Ultra Satin Urethane with Gloss Headstock Face
Neck Shape: Augmented “D”
Scale Length: 25.5″ (648 mm)
Fingerboard Material: Rosewood
Fingerboard Radius: 10″ to 14″ Compound Radius (254 mm to 355.6 mm)
Number of Frets: 22
Fret Size: Medium Jumbo Stainless Steel
Nut Material: Floyd Rose® Original Locking
Nut Width: 1.685″ (42.8 mm)
Inlays: White Pearloid Dot
Bridge Pickup: Ultra Double Tap™ Humbucking
Middle Pickup: Ultra Noiseless™ Hot Strat®
Neck Pickup: Ultra Noiseless™ Hot Strat®
Controls: Master Volume, Tone 1. (Neck/Middle Pickups), Tone 2. (Bridge Pickup)
3-Position Blade: Position 1. Bridge Pickup, Position 2. Bridge and Middle Pickup, Position 3. Middle Pickup, Position 4. Middle and Neck Pickup, Position 5. Neck Pickup
Configuration: HSS (Humbucker/Single/Single)
Bridge: Floyd Rose® Original Double-Locking 2-Point Tremolo
Hardware Finish: Nickle/Chrome
Tuning Machines: Deluxe Staggered Cast/Sealed Locking
Pickguard: 1-Ply Anodized Aluminum
Control Knobs: Aged White Soft Touch Knobs
Switch Tip: Aged White
Strings: Fender® USA 250L Nickel Plated Steel (.009-.042 Gauges), PN 0730250403
Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster Floid Rose out of the box
As with any new guitar the Fender Ultra Luxe Floid Rose comes with everything you need to get started. All case candy was included with a warranty card and manual. The guitar was packed well double boxed and bubble wrapped.
The guitar comes with a premium molded hard-shell case that is excellent for carrying on the road. The case is well padded on the inside and matches the guitar’s shape perfectly. This ensures that the guitar doesn’t move while being carried. The storage compartment of the case is very large offering more than enough space to store your picks, capos and all of your $$$ from your last bar gig.
Picking up the Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster Floid Rose for the first time
With its iconic body shape picking up the Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster will feel like a familiar old friend in your hands. The finish is glassy smooth under your fingers and it contours to your arm perfectly. The edges are round and smooth with no part of the body digging in to your arm.
Straight out of its case, the 2021 Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster Floyd Rose HSS is set up well. The action is perfect and set to a height that is very enjoyable to play. If you like the action lower, you can bring it down but the default set up works well for most styles.
The 22 Medium Jumbo Stainless Steel frets are polished to perfection with a smooth round finish. Running your fingers across the neck you can feel that the fret job is of very high quality. With Ultra rolled fingerboard edges, no more running your hands across a sharp fretboard when you play your next Free Bird solo!
Stainless-steel frets are significantly harder and smoother than traditional nickel-silver, giving them extreme durability and a fluid, glassy playing feel that makes bending easy. Compared with traditional nickel frets, stainless steel frets offer little resistance when bending strings. And since stainless steel is much harder than nickel your frets will last many times longer.
The tuning machines are well lubed, and there is no binding when turning them. This makes string changes slightly easier. The “Soft Touch” volume and tone knobs are very smooth and easy to control.
The tremolo system stays in tune perfectly allowing you to Channel your inner Steve Vai. But on a Strat!
Overall, the Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster Floyd Rose is near perfection out of the box. The deluxe hard-shell case helps protect it in shipping, and also on the road.
How does the Fender Ultra Luxe Floid Rose sound?
Let’s start with the most important part of a guitar, how it sounds. Because what is the point of all of its other features if the sound is not for you?
As you can hear the noiseless pickups offer the Fender chime without the 60 cycle hum. Plug it in to a high gain amp and you won’t get any noise!
In the neck position you get your typical fat Fender blues tone and the middle positions offer as much funky spank as you desire. However, the bridge is where things get interesting. When you press down on the volume pot, you’ll find the S-1 switch and activate the Double Tap feature on the humbucker. Double Tap splits the bridges humbucker into a single-coil without losing half of your volume like other coil-splitting designs.
The S 1 split is a welcome addition especially when playing solos. You can go from a single coil chime to a thick growling tone with the push of a button. This gives you two guitars in one offering the typical Fender tones but some added fatness for soloing. This is a very versatile guitar with many tonal options.
What pickups are installed in the Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster Floid Rose?
The Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster Floid Rose model is equipped with Ultra Noiseless™ Hot Strat® pickups in the neck and middle and an Ultra Double Tap™ Humbucking pickup in the bridge. The Hot Strat pickups are deliberately overwound to match the output of the Ultra Double tap.
Fender Ultra Noiseless Hot Stratocaster Pickup Set Features:
- Noiseless single-coil pickup set for Stratocaster
- Overwound pickups with Alnico V magnets for detailed, high-output tone
- Vintage Stratocaster voicing without the vintage hum and buzz
You can take a closer look at this pickup set from Sweetwater.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/0992291000–fender-ultra-noiseless-hot-Stratocaster-pickup-set
Fender Double Tap Bridge Humbucker Features:
- Designed by pickup guru Tim Shaw
- Exhibits a killer full-throated sound in humbucking mode
- Produces an impressively articulate sound in single-coil mode — with no volume loss
- Alnico IV magnets ensure an expressive, well-defined voice that’s brimming with dynamics
- Light wax potting keeps feedback to a minimum
- DC Resistance: 8KΩ
- Bridge position only
Take a closer look at the Ultra double tap at Sweetwater
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/0992280006–fender-double-tap-bridge-humbucker-pickup-black
Standard single coil pickups vs noiseless pickups
There are usually two schools of thought on noiseless pickups. On one hand they are excellent at philtering out that annoying 60 cycle hum associated with single coil pickups. This makes them excellent for recording applications or if you use a lot of gain. It is a breath of fresh air to some when they switch to the bridge and can’t hear the hum.
But the other school of thought is that noiseless pickups have a slightly different sound than regular pickups. This is because since the 60 cycle hum is philtered out some of your tone is also philtered along with it. So the noiseless pickups may not have the bell like chime that you are used to.
While noiseless pickups are usually thought of as being single coils, they are actually humbuckers. Noiseless pickups are a “stacked design” meaning that two single coils are stacked on top of one another canceling out the hum.
Noiseless pickups are humbuckers but mistaken as single-coils because they fit into the single-coil slot on a guitar’s body cavity. Fender just avoids confusion by marketing them as noiseless pickups without specifying if they are single or humbucking.
Some players would gladly take a slight difference in tone to relieve themselves of the 60 cycle nightmare. While others would rather hear the hum as they really enjoy the extra dynamics and chime of the regular pickups.
Just in case you are wondering, we would rather have regular pickups in our guitars as we find them to be more dynamic. We think the noiseless sound great but we think they are a bit to compressed. So while the Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster sounds great out of the box we may have a bit of fun and change them out.
How does the Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster play?
In spite of how it sounds the most important part of liking a guitar is how it plays. The Fender Ultra Luxe Stratocaster’s neck is an “Augmented D shape with a 10-14″ compound radius.”
This “Augmented” neck shape means that the neck starts at the headstock as a smaller C shape, gradually tapering to a D shape as you move up the fretboard. The radius also changes starting out as a 10 gradually flattening to a 14″. The idea of the compound-radius fingerboard is that chords are easier to play closer to the nut and lead lines closer to the bridge.
Taken from Fender: Fender guitars typically have a “C”-, “U”- or “V”-shaped neck profile (sometimes referred to as backshape). “C” is the most common of these, appearing on most contemporary models, such as those in the Deluxe and Standard series.
The comfortable oval shape of the “C” profile isn’t as deep as that of the two others, and is good for most playing styles. The “U” profile is fatter (i.e., a “baseball bat” neck), and the “V” profile has narrower shoulders and a sharper spine.
Fender’s new compound-profile neck shaping gives players easier access the upper reaches of the fingerboard, with superior ergonomic comfort from top to bottom.”
The Satin Urethane finish on the back of the neck gives you a nice smooth feel as you glide along the fretboard and the tapered neck heel and hand contour on the lower cutaway give you easy access to the higher frets.
For us the neck is enjoyable to play however we would prefer a C shape all the way down without the extra with of the shoulders at the high end. But it plays great none the less.
Stainless steel frets- a first for Fender on a production line guitar
While the idea of Stainless steel frets has been around for many years especially on higher end guitars, this is a first for Fender. Normally fret wire is made from nickel silver. This softer metal means that your string wares the fret out faster. This leads to fret work and even entire fret jobs over time.
The advantage of stainless steel frets is that steel is much harder than the guitar string. Meaning that the frets will not ware nearly as fast as nickel silver wire. The 22 medium-jumbo stainless steel frets allow for effortless bending and vibrato offering a smoother feel under the fingers than traditional frets. And they will last many times longer!
A Fender Stratocaster with a Floid Rose system?
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. That is a real life Floid Rose system installed on a production line Stratocaster. But why would any guitarist in their right mind want a Floid Rose on a Strat? Truthfully this is something we had thought about for a few years. And we are quite happy with the results.
The Floyd Rose allows for as much diving, pulling, vibratoing or any other form of musical note torture that comes to mind without going out of tune. This is not your cheap tremolo system!
But as with any locking tremolo setup everything else still applies. You will need to unlock the nut if you want to make major tuning changes. But once you have the guitar mostly in tune you can lock the nut down and fine tune at the bridge. But when it’s in tune it stays in tune perfectly!
However as with any other floating bridge setup you do have some drawbacks to be aware of.
Since the bridge is floating you will need to use slightly more pressure to bend a string. Nothing major but it is worth mentioning.
You can’t sustain an open string while bending other strings to solo on top of the open note. Doing this pulls the open note out of tune because the bridge is constantly moving with the tension changes.
Only other issue we had is that you can hear that trem “fluttering” sound when you pick a note hard. But putting an extra trem spring in the back will take care of that problem.
For those of you who have used guitars with floating bridges these small drawbacks are nothing new. But it is worth mentioning for those who do not have much experience with floating setups.
Our personal preference would be a guitar with locking tuners instead of a locking nut. But we do not do major dive bombs and tremolo wankery very much. We do however think it’s awesome when you do though. 🙂
Fender Ultra Luxe Floid Rose summery
With its Unique neck shape, stainless steel frets and Floid Rose tremolo, the Ultra Luxe Floid Rose certainly has some unique features that set it apart from other Strats. You can take a look at this guitar at Sweetwater today.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/StratAULFHMS–fender-american-ultra-luxe-stratocaster-floyd-rose-hss-silverburst-with-maple-fingerboard
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