It is a Fender Stratocaster Hot Rod Reissue, means it got upgraded hardwares like Floyd Rose tremolo and Dimarzio pickups and some fancy wiring under the hood, it was made in Fujigen factory, Matsumoto Nagano, Japan, arguably the best guitar factory in Japan. I brought it new in the summer of 1993, and oh yeah, mum paid half of it.
It was a hot summer break, and for some reason, I managed to got myself a decent, but boring summer job, working at a bank.I remember it was mostly a data entry and filing kind of a job. It was kinda nice to sit in an office all day with A/C cranked. Also, the same summer, I got dumped by my girl friend.
I been playing guitar for couple years by then, I had an budget electric guitar that never really suits my needs or style, more importantly, most of my guitars heroes play Stratocaster. So I saved up most of the money I got form the summer job, and start shopping, I remember spent a couple weeks going to the biggest music store in Hong Kong, played all the Stratocaster they have, and keep going back to the rack that they stock all these Japanese made Fender guitars, they played and sounded and looked great, the only problem was, they were a bit out of my budget.
One night, I sneaked out for a cigarette and got caught by my mother, surprisingly, I didn’t get yelled at too much, instead, she started lectured me a lesson about life, specifically focused on relationship and and all those stuff, the whole point was, it is ok to be dumped. At the end of the conversation, she asked me if there was anything she can do to make me feel better, and the next day I was at the music store again, having trouble to pick the color of the guitar I wanted!
It was red and basically my weapon of choice for all the gigs I’ve got.
