The fiesta red issue

[cockroach]

Surely it comes down to the player's skill, originality, talent, taste, and technique....

...regardless of the brand name on the headstock?

Personally, I get far greater pleasure at a gig or jam etc if a regular punter or especially another musician or guitar player tells me that they enjoyed my playing, rather than saying something like ..'wow, that XXX brand guitar sounds fantastic'...

Listen with your ears NOT your eyes...and take brand names (particularly expensive 'name' brands) with a pinch of salt...I've heard lots of incompetent musicians using expensive gear...they still sounded like incompetent musicians..

[abstamaria]

To get back on topic, one cannot possibly play an early Shadows piece except on a fiesta-red Stratocaster. It will not sound the same. That is established fact.

Ideally, the bass guitar should be fiesta red, too – a sunburst would be more correct for “Apache,” but the tone difference of a non-Fiesta-red finish on a Precision bass is less obvious. Not so on a Strat. We purists will spot the difference on the first note. Maybe the second.

Andy

[JimN]

To get back on topic, one cannot possibly play an early Shadows piece except on a fiesta-red Stratocaster. It will not sound the same. That is established fact.
Ideally, the bass guitar should be fiesta red, too – a sunburst would be more correct for “Apache,” but the tone difference of a non-Fiesta-red finish on a Precision bass is less obvious. Not so on a Strat. We purists will spot the difference on the first note. Maybe the second.
Andy

It's very similar with the Jazzmaster for Walk - Don't Run: it never sounds right unless the guitar is finished in three-colour sunburst and has the earlier dots'n'no-binding neck and original shape headstock and decal.

When Don Wilson was playing a post-CBS B'n'B Jazzmaster in the late seventies and early eighties, the Ventures sounded completely different, and "wrong".

In the meantime, whenever out at a gig or a jam, I live in abject fear of being told that my guitar isn't a bad instrument "for the money" - the faintest praise with which one may ever be damned.