Fender Limited Edition American Professional Classic Stratocaster Silent System, Rosewood Fingerboard, 3-Color Sunburst

The Fender Limited Edition American Professional Classic Stratocaster Silent System is the Corona-built Strat that finally deals with single-coil hum without touching the pickups that cause it. Three Coastline '57 single-coils sit under a mint green guard, a rosewood board runs over a Modern "C" maple neck, and Fender's new Silent System does its work with no battery, no preamp and nothing to switch on. In 3-Color Sunburst with a vintage-tinted headstock and gold transition logo, it reads like a guitar from 1962 and behaves like one built this year.

The Silent System — the hum goes, the single-coils stay

Every quiet Strat pickup before this one asked you to give something up: a stacked coil, a dummy coil in the cavity, a preamp and a 9-volt block in the back. Fender's Silent System is patent-pending, entirely passive and battery-free, so there is nothing to charge, nothing to go flat two songs into a set, and no active circuitry sitting between the pickups and your lead. What it takes away is the mains buzz that follows single-coils around a stage full of dimmers, LED walls and dodgy house power. What it leaves alone is the pickups themselves.

Three Coastline '57 single-coils

These are genuine single-coils, wound to a vintage-output recipe rather than pushed hard for volume. The bridge unit cuts and snaps, the middle position gives you that hollow, glassy cluck, and the neck pickup rounds off warm and vocal — the five positions a Strat player already has mapped in muscle memory, reached through a 5-position blade switch with a white tip. Nothing here is a humbucker wearing a single-coil cover.

Two tone controls, one of them a Greasebucket

The wiring splits the tone controls rather than doubling them up. Tone 1 covers the neck and middle pickups the traditional way. Tone 2 runs Fender's Greasebucket circuit on the bridge pickup, which winds the top end down without letting the low end swell up to fill the space — so the bridge position stays usable and tight when you roll it back, instead of turning to mud. Master volume sits where it always has, under your little finger.

A neck you can work a whole gig on

The Modern "C" maple neck carries a 9.5" radius rosewood fingerboard, 22 medium jumbo frets and white dot inlays, with a 1.685" synthetic bone nut and the standard 25.5" Fender scale. Satin urethane on the back keeps your hand moving; the skunk stripe and four-bolt neck plate are exactly where a Strat's should be. The vintage-tinted headstock face wears the gold transition logo and the Corona, California stamp.

Vintage hardware, chosen not decorative

A six-saddle vintage-style synchronised tremolo with bent-steel saddles and a white-tip arm handles the wobble, and ClassicGear staggered tuners hold the string break over the nut without a row of retainers. Chrome throughout, aged-white knobs and pickup covers, a three-ply mint green pickguard over an alder body in gloss urethane, and the angled chrome jack plate on the lower bout. The 3-Color Sunburst is the real thing — dark chocolate edge into red into amber, with the back burst run all the way around. Fender packs it in a deluxe gig bag.

Set up in-store by Guitar World Australia's techs before it ships to you, so it plays perfectly the moment it arrives.