Fender Squier Debut Series Stratocaster Electric Guitar, Beginner Guitar, with 2-Year Warranty, Includes Free Lessons, Black with Matte Finish

A legitimate Fender guitar for the price of a cheap clone, that is legitimately amazing! I own a couple cheap guitars that cost as much as this Fender Squire, but the difference in build quality is amazing. This thing feels and plays like butter, and aside from tuning the strings, the setup as near as I can measure it is spot on. The string height, neck adjustment, and intonation were perfect. The attention to detail is evident in everything from the way the strings are wound on the tuners, to the design and manufacture of something like the string tree, which all the cheap guitars get horribly wrong. Plays great, sounds great, looks great, and it's a real Fender for the price of a clone. What's not to love.

I cannot get over this guitar! It plays just as well as my MIM Fender strat which cost 4x more. The setup is nearly perfect right out of the box with nice action, I just tuned it up and started playing. The fretwork is solid, decently polished frets with reasonably clean ends, no buzzing frets and the neck feels great in the hand. The electronics are where you notice the low price, generic non-staggered ceramic pickups that sound OK but just are not as clean or balanced as properly staggered Strat pickups and don't have the same depth of tone as alnico magnets. Overall these are great guitars for beginners or experienced players that want something light and easy to play

Here is a quick rundown. I received this on 11/29/2024. It was set to spec as far as the neck relief and string height. The tuners worked smoothly and held the tuning. The strings as fine. No sharp fret ends and the frets were highly polished. Confortable neck shape. The pickup switch felt and worked well and the tone and volumes were smooth. The output jack was properly tightened and works well. The pickups sounded just fine and the pieces aligned under the strings just as vintage ones do. It sounds very good unplugged. The trem arm screws in properly but the trem took a lot of pressure to work. This is really no issues and I am sure they did this to keep it in tune. If you are new to Strats, the vintage trem rarely ever stood in tune, don't use the trem as it is really for show in most Strats. In the real world it takes a lot of skill and know-how to get a Strat trem to work properly and costs more than the guitar to setup, which I am telling you will be impossible anyway. These are set with the rear decked on the body so it returns to tune meaning you can only go down. If you are learning you should learn to play for real and not be a poser playing with the trem. Leave the trem arm in the bag. There is nothing needed to be done or replaced to have a good guitar to learn on. It appears the price is so low as to be get you started and updating the phone app and taking lessons online and later buying a more expensive guitar, that is where they plan to profit. The guitar is like an when you buy a low cost inkjet printer for very little money and have to buy their ink forever. Is the guitar worth it ? Absolutely. Also buy a $30 or so case to keep it in might be a good idea. Realize if you are buying this for a gift for someone to learn on, most new players quit as they rather stare at their phone or play a video game so buying a low cost guitar is a good idea. The 2-year warranty is worth more than the guitar alone. Be careful removing the plastic on the pickguard and pickups, the pickguard plastic is very soft and scratches easily. After a few days I decided that the nut needed to be filed slightly for each string so I took care of that. I also lowered the action lower than Fender specs to 4mm with no buzzing. None of these things were out of the ordinary for a new Strat guitar. I am very happy with this guitar. After a few months after being too dry in my house the fretboard did shrink somewhat making for fret sprout (sharp frets past the edge of the fretboard. Fret sprout is not uncommmon even in much more expensive guitars. So I filed the edges and polished the frets when I was at it and put a set of Ernie Ball Super Slinky 9-43 (2223). Guitars are made of wood and wood is affected by moisture. That's life. I am still happy with the guitar. If you are just learning it is unlikely you will be running you hand up and down the neck so it may not matter at all if there is some fret sprout. It was not really that bad when it happened.

I wanted to be 100% in love with this guitar and have it be playable right out of the box, and write a rave review. But unfortunately, that was not the case. This was not a guitar that had been returned to Amazon. You could tell it was brand new and never had been opened.When I first saw the color in person, I said WHOA. I love Squier Strats, especially red ones. I actually prefer them over the Fender Strats. I have way too many of them as it is, so when these first came out, I told myself I didn't need another one. But I kept seeing the reviews on YouTube. Not a single person did not rave about this guitar for the price. There may have been something here and there that was a little off, but they all couldn't believe the quality for the price point. I was also impressed by the matte finish. Alas, I am a sucker for a red Squier. I also figured maybe in time it would be one of those collector item guitars like some of the older Squiers are. So I said screw it, you only live once, Christmas present for myself, things are going to cost more from China very soon, and every other excuse I could think of, and ordered it. Going by the pictures, I wasn't impressed with that particular shade of red, but hey, it was red.I let it acclimate in the box indoors for 24 hours, like I usually do.When I finally pulled away the foam bag, I stood still and looked at it, and I really think my mouth was hanging open. I was blown away. None of the pictures do the color justice. It's a beautiful, deep matte burgundy red, like a wine red. It is gorgeous. They didn't cheap out on the pickguard like they did with the Sonic series, and just give it a plain white pickguard. This pickguard has the black stripe in it, which gives this guitar just such a beautiful accent. Some people here complained about the frets being sharp. I could see a couple here or there that I could pretty much even take down with a nail file if I wanted to. Nothing that would ever scratch me, or beginner, or a child with this guitar.Here's where things went south quickly. I tuned it up and plugged it in. Every string buzzed. It was not playable at all. Upon further inspection I saw that the truss rod had been left tightened all the way from the factory. A little loosening of the truss rod took care of most of the buzzing. I tuned it up again. The intonation was off on the low E and A and the low E still slightly buzzed. Some more tweaking and finally it was playing the way it was supposed to be.I can tell you that this guitar is light. It's thin. The pickups sound good. The fret ends are fine. The fretboard is really pretty and smooth. The tuners hold tune well. The knobs and switches work just fine.But if I was a beginner and this was my first guitar, and I didn't know anyone who knew anything about guitars, I would not have known what to do. I would have been even more disappointed than I was. Because of the rave reviews of this guitar, I am sure the one that I got was just a fluke. If anyone got it, I'm glad it was me because it was fixed in 5 minutes. But had I gotten this as a gift for a kid, I would have been really upset for the kid.Yes, I could have returned it, but I like working on guitars anyway. If you know your way around guitars and are getting this for a kid, grab one. It's a great guitar. I would definitely get it for someone, but also tell them if there's anything weird about it to let me know. Do I regret buying this? No way. I love the guitar. Just on the day that mine was made, someone in China was having a bad day.