While I always loved the look of a well played (worn) guitar, after seeing pics of SRV with his beloved 59 Strat, I was hooked. In fact, over the years I have tried to achieve this look myself (before Fender relics were ever marketed) with limited success. The very first guitar I ever owned, my Cort electric with the Garfield graphic showcases my first attempt at relicing.

Handcrafted at the Fender Custom Shop, each Relic instrument undergoes a unique "aging" process, resulting in a new instrument with the comfortable playing feel and look of a vintage guitar. The idea is said to have come from Keith Richards when he asked Fender to make him some new guitars that captured the worn, broken in feel of his vintage instruments.

Fender did a fantastic job and these new guitars capture the look, playability and vibe of the originals by combining an alder body, 21-fret rosewood fingerboard maple neck, vintage style tremolo bridge, vintage style tuning machines and specially wound Custom 60's pickups. To distinguish the Relic Series' Custom Shop origins, the word "Relic" appears on the body under the neck plate. The Fender Custom Shop logo is also imbedded into the wood on the back of the headstock as well as under the pickguard on the body of each instrument.

I was hooked and knew I had to have one as soon as I tried a few out at my local dealer. The problem was that because each guitar in the Relic Series has a personality of its own due to the unique nature of the aging process, it was hard to deicide on which one. In the end I narrowed my decision down to two guitars, which both had gold hardware and rosewood fretboards. While I loved the look of the Daphne blue color of one of the guitars, the burgundy mist one felt more comfortable in my hands. As you know, guitar players are extremely vain and how a guitar looks is almost as important as how well a guitar plays and sounds. In the end I let playability be the deciding factor and purchased the burgundy mist one. It was a tough decision and I guess I should have bought them both to avoid the trauma associated with that decision, lol. Back then, (1996, when this series first came out) these guitars were a hard sell as many people could not understand why people would buy a brand new guitar that was already beat up.

At the time I purchased this relic Strat, I had some eight Fender Stratocasters in my collection. Within short order, this guitar quickly replaced them all and today I have only two Strats in my collection, this one with a rosewood fretboard and my ’57 reissue that was relic’d (aged) by Melody music with a maple board.

These early relics are excellent guitars that really capture the vintage vibe. There is some interest in the early examples like this one, as people believe that there was more attention paid to detail and as a result, the overall look of these early relics more closely resembles the vintage examples.