Bruce's Decision to Play a Stratocaster

[Ivan Pongracic Jr]

white pickguard

Here's another photo of Hank with a white Strat circa '63, with a shell guard in this case. (Found this one on the web a few years ago, and since I had never seen it, I saved it. I don't remember the source of it anymore.)

Hank with a white Strat in 1963.jpg (22.2 KiB) Viewed 5393 times

I'm also attaching the cover of a book on the Shadows from the summer of '63. (It lists Atlantis as their most recent single.) If you look pretty closely, you can see that (presumably) Hank's Strat was pretty scratched up at this point, lots of dings in it. I'm sure they thought it didn't look very professional!



Here's just the guitar, magnified:

[Paul Childs]

With there not being much knowledge about setups in the early days of The Shadows that is probably why Bruce had the tremolo arm attached on his Strat as can be seen in early pictures instead of using a tremolo block which would have helped with his tuning problem.
I assume 34346 has had a block in it since Bruce took it over.

[George Geddes]

Yeah, he just swung the arm back out of the way in the early days...

Feorge

[Didier]

A less common Strat played by Hank :



Didier