“There’s so much baggage that comes with a Strat”: Why Chris Buck is ditched his Fender for a Yamaha Revstar
Iconic as the Stratocaster may be, its history also comes with a heavy set of expectations.
St. Vincent, for one, previously described the Strat as burdened with the “cultural baggage” of “a history of people trying to play like Jimi Hendrix and sucking”, a pressure that “scared” her off the instrument for years.
And now, Cardinal Black guitarist Chris Buck says he too stepped away from his Strat, trading it for a Yamaha Revstar to escape the “baggage” that comes with playing one of the world’s most legendary guitars.
READ MORE: “I don’t subscribe to the idea that all vintage instruments are great”: Chris Buck on why cheap guitars can be just as effective as expensive ones
Chatting in a new Guitar World interview, the longtime Fender player looks back on the first time he encountered the Revstar: “I walked into a guitar shop in Cardiff and the Revstar had just been released. This would have been like late 2015, maybe. I saw a selection of them on the wall and was immediately intrigued… There were always Yamaha acoustics around the house as well, so Yamaha was always a brand that I was kind of cool with.”
“I just loved the idea of the Revstar being a new guitar,” says Buck. “It wasn’t an S type, it wasn’t a T type, it wasn’t a Les Paul, it was its own thing, and just such a simple, ergonomically kind of attractive guitar – three-way switch, master volume, master tone, two pickups… boom, you’re away.”
But Buck’s reasoning went beyond design. Playing a Strat had started to feel like carrying the weight of history.
“Part of me was getting a little bit miffed or kind of just annoyed with the idea that playing a Strat – as I had done for a very long time until that point – there’s so much baggage that comes with a Strat, arguably more so than any other guitar, because it’s such a distinctive sounding guitar,” says the musician.
“The moment you’re maybe on the neck pickup with an amp that’s kind of pumping, and you’re kind of playing quite aggressively, well, it’s Stevie Ray [Vaughan].”
“If you’re kind of on the bridge pickup, and you’ve got a load of gain or you run into a Marshall, then you’re Ritchie Blackmore. If you’re in the in-between positions… you’re John Mayer. If you start using the tremolo bar, you know, you’ll have the older generation coming out going, ‘Hank Marvin.’”
With the Revstar, that pressure is gone, says Buck, and he’s free to explore his own sound without being compared to the guitar greats.
“There’s no baggage attached with that,” he says. “I can kind of feel like I’m stepping out of their shadows just by virtue of picking up a different guitar.”
The post “There’s so much baggage that comes with a Strat”: Why Chris Buck is ditched his Fender for a Yamaha Revstar appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
