Chords for Eric Johnson's Fender Stratocaster Rap Session | Fender

[Bm] _ [G] _ _ _ [F] _ [Am] _ _ _
_ _ [Em] _ _ [A] _ _ [D] _ [A] _
_ [C] _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _
[C] _ [E] _ _ [A] _ _ [Am] _ _ _
_ _ _ Hi, I'm Eric Johnson and I'm glad to be [N] here to talk to you about this new Fender Signature
Stratocaster.
It's a rosewood neck model, kind of like the one I had out about three
years ago, the maple neck version, but we've kind of recreated the thing with a rosewood
Strat version.
You know, ever since I was 11 years old, I've had kind of a relationship
with Fender.
I got my first guitar, I got a Fender Music Master as a little student
model guitar, and so ever since then I've kind of had a love affair with Fender and
all the cool colors, you know, and they're stuck in the sand of the beach and the catalogs
and the girls.
It's always had kind of a mystique, you know, and it made me want to play guitar
and I started listening to the [Am] Ventures and [C] _ _ _ the Rolling Stones.
[F] _ _
[A#] So [A] _ [C#m] all through the years
I'd get all these catalogs of the Fender catalogs, I'd take them to school and I'd stick them
inside my textbooks and I'd sit in class and, you know, I'm supposed to be looking at algebra
or math and inside I'd be looking at the Tilt-Back Dual Showman with the, you know,
Strat and everything.
There was a catalog in 1965 that had the Fender Strat in a rosewood
model, but in 1965 for a really short amount of time they had one with this binding on the neck,
and when we started talking about doing this rosewood version, I thought, wow, it'd be neat
to just put that binding on to get that kind of old look.
You know, I wanted to bring that
back to the beginning of Fender where, you know, the surf music, the rock and the Americana.
_ _ [G] _ _ [Em] At the same time, it's also a new instrument and [G] there's a number of things about it that
are modern that I tried [E] to put inside of that classic design.
[C] _ _ _ _ _ [G] _ _
So I'd like to talk briefly
about the birth of this signature Strat.
Over the years I've kind of been [A#] fortunate to own
different old Strats, rosewood Strats that I've run across over the years, and of all
of the rosewood Strats that I've ever found before, this particular one right here has
been my favorite one, and particularly the neck on this one.
It's a 62, I think, and the neck is
just right.
Michael Braun and I used this neck to design the neck on the new Fender rosewood
model.
I was really digging the way this one sounded.
_ [A] _
_ _ [G#] It's _ _ _ _
[B] _ got that kind of tone [F#m] that I was
looking for, and so we worked hard on this new model to basically get, you know, kind of the
same sound.
We're going to just kind of get the same deal going.
_ [F#] _ _ [G#] _ _ _ _
_ _ [N] I'm kind of really pleased about
this new one because we've got that neck and the tone and also the contour, the way the body,
you know, is kind of a slimmer contour like they did in the 60s, and we were able to kind of get
that together, and I wanted to make a guitar that would be accessible to people and still have a lot
of the appointments and attributes that Leo Fender designed [D] in Fender originally, [F] _ _ [A] _ [F#m] _
[E] _ _ _ [G#] _ [C#m] _ _ [F#m] _ _
_ [A] and then we put in
a [B] few extra features, like we made a [C#m] flatter radius board [F#m] with big frets [Fm] just for playing
[B] ease and lower action.
You know, we didn't do the string tree just like we didn't do [A#] on the
maple [B] neck version a few years ago just to keep for [A] better tuning, [F#] and we did the [F] contours, [C#] _
[E] you
know, streamline like the old days, and then [A] we worked on the pickup just a little bit.
We wanted
to kind of EQ the pickup for the rosewood neck, so it's a little bit of an adjustment in the EQ of
the pickups to kind of accommodate the 60s appointments on this guitar.
_ _ [F#] _ _ So if I had to
bring up in a nutshell what's important to me on a guitar, here are the things that really are,
that it stays in tune really well, and so we tried to keep this headstock not too much in
an angle, and we did these keys that go at an angle incrementally from the top, the low E to
the top E, so that you didn't need the string tree, so there would be less friction, so it would stay
in tune better, and then of course having a little bit [E] better action so that, you know, like the board
a little flatter so I _ _ can_
_ _ [C] _ [G] _ _ without it fretting out, you know, [F#m] so if I can stretch the strings a
little more, if the curved board, they kind of, you know, would fret out.
That's important to me,
and then of course, you know, that it just feels good, and then the tone.
We made this pickup just
a little bit hotter than the old ones, so they have a little bit more of that_
just _ [B] _
[F#] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[A] _ [B] a little
bit more gain to them.
Now what's also important to me is that I can go through all kind of different
textures of tones, and then it kind of cover all the bases, you know, not just a good lead tone,
so you can't, you know, you got to design the vibration of the wood and the type of the [C] pickups
to where they'll also get other sounds.
So if I was to turn the gain down a little bit, I wanted to
be able to get a little bit of a kind of a crunch tone too that would work on these pickups.
_ _ [Am] _ [A] _ [D] _ _
[B] _ [E] _ [D] _ _ _ _ [E] _ [A] _
_ _ _ [E] _ [A] _ _ I had
to have it kind of work that way as well, so it wouldn't be just a, you know, a dark kind of lead
tone either, you know, to have the kind [Bm] of best of both worlds.
[G] _ _ [A] _ [F] One of the challenges was trying to
get the pickups to get those kind of lead tones and dirty rhythm tones, but at the same time, if I
wanted to go clean, it would still get kind of a nice, [F#m] you know, pretty clean tone, so you had to
have it just the kind of right balance on the tone, you know, on the pickups.
_ _ [C#m] _ [A] _ [E] _ [Am] _ [E] _ _
[C] _ _ _ [Dm] _ [C] _ _ _ _
[D] _ _ [G] _ [E] _ [A] _ _ [F#m] _ _
[A] _ _ [E] _ _ [Bm] _ [A] _ _ [D] _
[A] _ _ _ [D] _ [A] _ _ _ _
_ _ So by just adjusting
the pickups just right, as well as the way they're designed, it kind of can cover all [E] those bases.
[C] _ [D] _ _ [Em] _
[Am] _ [D] _ _ _ [G] _ _ _ [C] _
_ _ _ _ _ [G] _ _ _
_ [E] _ _ [Am] So I
want to thank you for joining me on this little wrap session that we've had about this Signature
Strat, and I want to invite you to check them out, and I do hope maybe you might enjoy them as much as I do.
_ _ [F#] _ _ _ [E] _ [A] _ _
[C] _ [G] _ _ [A] _ _ _ [Bm] _ _
_ _ [C] _ [D] _ _ _ [B] _ [C] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _