When Fender unveiled the Eric Johnson Thinline Stratocaster back in 2018, it made history as the firm’s first-ever semi-hollow Strat to feature a custom-chambered design with traditional arm and body contours – but despite its game-changing nature, it turns out not a whole lot of thought went into its creation.
At least, there wasn’t from Johnson himself, who admits in the new issue of Guitarist that his history-making signature guitar was the result of some rather cursory experimentation with the f-hole idea.
In fact, as the electric guitar virtuoso recalls, he and Fender ran with the first successful concept they created. However, if he were ever to do another semi-hollow signature, Johnson says he’d take a different approach – and would look to one of Fender’s main rivals for inspiration.
“I didn’t do a ton of exploration on the f-hole Strat idea,” he recalls. “We came up with one concept and it worked pretty well, but it would be interesting to try a bunch of different construction techniques because I think there’s a lot of room in there to explore that more.
“But there are so many different ways you can achieve a hollowbody guitar. We did it where we took a solidbody guitar, sawed the top off, hollowed it out and put the top back on.
“If I had to do it again, I might do it completely differently – maybe do it more like a [Gibson ES-] 335 or something.”
The Thinline Stratocaster design has remained a rarity in the regular Fender lineup, though has sporadically been reimagined under a variety of guises, most recently in the form of the Suona line from 2023.
But it wasn’t just the f-hole that made Johnson’s signature stand out. Instead, the blues rock guitar hero sought a number of specs that would set his own Strat apart from the rest of the crop.
“I wanted a certain kind of neck profile and I wanted a tone control on the bridge pickup so that I could even it out with the neck pickup,” Johnson says of his initial design brief.
“I wanted the fingerboard kind of flat with big frets, and I wanted a quarter-sawn maple neck for stability. I just wanted it to sound good, you know?
“On the early models that I’ve done – there are two models that I do with Fender – one has a copy of an old Strat pickup but a little bit more powerful. And then the other specialty Strat I have out, the [Stories Collection 1954] Virginia model, has a DiMarzio HS-2 in the bridge, but I don’t hook up the bottom coil.
“I just use the top single coil only and it is significantly hotter than a regular vintage Strat pickup, and that’s why I like it.”
Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitarist, which features interviews with Brian May, Rosanne Cash and more.
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