Electric guitar

My Squier bullet strat review

In this Squier bullet strat review I’ll be using my own bullet strat to demonstrate some of the sounds as well as give you some ideas on how to get the most out of the instrument.

For starters, I am suitably impressed with the quality of the guitar. I don’t usually buy the bottom of the range cheapest guitar I can find, but on a recent trip to Australia, sponsored by my dear big brother, I was reluctant to take one of my guitars along and thought it would be easier to just buy the cheapest half decent guitar I could find while I was there.

Of course my thinking soon turned to the idea of finding a good beginners electric guitar that I could recommend to others. It just so happened that not only was the Squier bullet strat the cheapest beginner electric guitar made by Fender, but also the cheapest beginner electric guitar I could find out of all the makes.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t cheaper options for a beginner, but at the time and the places I went to, this was the case. I’ll list some other alternatives as well at the end for those of you looking for a decent stratocaster copy on a budget that won’t budge.

The Squier bullet strat price:

Truth be told, I was expecting to pay less in Oz or at least the same price I had seen them advertised for online. It turned out to be more expensive there at 199 Australian dollars. The current going price online for a Squier bullet strat is about 119 US dollars.

Here you can see all the features of a Standard Squier Bullet Strat

The Squier bullet strat features:

The features of the Squier bullet strat are exactly the same as a standard Fender Stratocaster. There’s some compromise in the quality of the Bullet strat over a regular Stratocaster, but this is to be expected.

• Like any Fender Stratocaster this has a bolt on neck: The advantage of this is that if something happens to either the neck or the body, the whole guitar isn’t wasted. There are Fender Strat replacement parts made by many companies. Another nice thing about that is the ability to upgrade just about any part of the guitar later on to turn it into whatever stratocaster your heart desires.
• Three single coil pickups: I was pleasantly surprised by the true to form Stratocaster sound these pickups delivered. There are now other options for pickup configurations available in the Squier Bullet range since I bought mine. There’s the Fat Strat with a humbucker pickup in the bridge position as well, which is great for getting a wider range of sounds. Humbucking pickups are better at producing a good rock sound in the bridge position.
• A maple neck with rosewood fretboard and what I think are medium jumbo frets: I found the neck to be slighly fatter than an old Affinity Strat I once used. It is still a comfortable thickness and doesn’t slow me down noticeably. The fretwork on mine was very well done and with a proper setup I was able to get a fairly low action, which I like.
• A vintage style tremelo: I personally prefer this to the 2 point fulcrum tremelo, but I’m not a big tremelo user so it’s a minor issue. The thing to keep in mind with this guitar is that exessive use of the tremelo will pull the guitar out of tune. This isn’t a flaw in the tremelo design but rather a shortcoming of the headstock design. This can be remedied later on with a couple of small upgrades, but I’ll get into that later.
• A 5 way pickup selector switch: This lets you select not only each pickup, which all have a different sound because of their position, but an extra two positions 2 and 4 which still have that classic shimmering stratocaster sound even though it’s their cheapest guitar. Positions 2 and 4 combine the first and second pickup or second and third pickup out of phase with each other. This also helps cancel out external interference from flourescent lights, computer monitors, TV’s and anything else that emits radio frequencies.
• One volume and two tone controls: This is something I’ll never understand about Stratocaster guitars. The two tone controls on a Stratocaster are for the middle and neck pickups, and like all passive tone controls they can only cut the amount of treble. All fine and well, except that these two positions don’t need it at all. The bridge pickup needs one sometimes. Oh well….. I guess I’ll just have to live with a trebly bridge pickup if I want a Standard Strat sound. If you go for the Fat Strat Bullet there’s at least a humbucker pickup there which is fuller and fatter sounding for rock music.
• 6 inline tuning keys: Although these are cheaper tuners to what you find on most guitars, being only covered as opposed to sealed die-cast tuners, they work well and keep the guitar in tune. When beginners have a problem with their guitar not staying in tune, more often than not it’s from trying to use the tremelo system too vigorously, tuning down to notes instead of up, having too many windings around the tuning post (3 is more than enough, even 2) or not understanding that new strings have to be stretched in first.
• Strap buttons: These are big enough and even my old worn out guitar strap stays on.

In this video I demonstrate the clean sounds of my Squier Bullet Strat

For the sake of added musicality the guitar sound has a touch of reverb. It’s a good thing to keep in mind that a guitar can only be as good as the amplifier you play it through. The clean sound is a better way to determine the tonal characteristics of a guitar, and in this case I’ve recorded it straight into the mixing desk.

More sounds of the Squier Bullet Strat:

I was going to make another video to demonstrate what this guitar sounds like with overdrive and distortion, and I may still do that, but for now here are some simple audio samples just to give a better idea.

Squier bullet strat – Bridge pickup overdrive

Squier bullet strat – Bridge and middle pickup overdrive

Squier bullet strat – Middle pickup overdrive

Squier bullet strat – Middle and neck pickup overdrive

Squier bullet strat – Neck pickup overdrive

It’s best to keep in mind that a guitar can only sound as good as the amplifier you play it through, so I can’t guarantee that you’ll get the same sound as me. Most beginner electric guitar packs feature some small practice amp along with other goodies. These small amps usually have a 6 or 8 inch speaker which in most cases allow too much high frequency through which always makes the distortion effect sound too buzzy.

There are of course exceptions to this rule, and true to form, you can expect it from Fender in the Fender Mustang 1 guitar amplifier

The perfect size guitar speaker is a 12 inch. This gives you enough bass end and good midrange frequency response for that typical electric guitar sound. It’s only when you have a well designed and engineered practice amplifier that you can hope to get the most out of your beginner electric guitar.

The Squier Bullet Strat is capable of producing a quality Stratocaster sound when used in conjunction with the right equipment.

What colors and options are available for the Squier Bullet Strat

There are 3 options, or types of Bullet Strat available as well as a few basic color choices. There’s the regular Strat with three single coil pickups, the Fat Strat which has a humbucker pickup in the bridge position and the Double Fat Strat (Although they don’t call it that) which has two humbucking pickups – One in the bridge position and one in the neck position.

The pickup configurations are described by the letters SSS for a typical three single coils, HSS for the Fat Strat and HH for the double humbucker version.

If you’re into rock guitar music but enjoy a little bluesy tone as well, I would go for the HSS Fat Strat option as it seems the most versitile. The double humbucker HH could be nice as well but then you’re missing out on those nice inbetween tones for some tasteful clean rhythm sounds.

Colours: All I can tell you is what colors are available and then advise you to choose a black one, unless of course you’ve got your heart set on a pink one.

The choices for color are, brown sunburst, arctic white, Daphne blue, Black, pink and fiesta red. Okay, I can’t really say which color to choose but from what I’ve heard and if I remember correctly, the arctic white is more of a cream color and the Daphne blue is more of a sea greenish color.

In conclusion: For a beginner on a budget, I think the Squier Bullet Strat is great value and a very workable guitar. As I’ve said before, just about everything on a Stratocaster style guitar is changeable at some stage and this will get you started nicely. Have it set up properly by a professional, or if you want, do a search and find out how to do it yourself seeing as it’s a valuable part of learning electric guitar.

If you’re looking for something cheaper but similar in quality, try an SX or Douglas Here.

Tips to help make it easy to learn to play electric guitar online.

Tip no 1 – find a friend who has already made some progress on the guitar.

This will help make it a lot easier to learn. When it comes to online guitar lessons, especially electric guitar lessons, I’ve noticed a tendency for most of them to be a bit too advanced for the beginner guitarist. This seems to be especially true for the free lessons.

Electric guitarists tend to be fanatics, and get carried away with showing all sorts of cool stuff to learn on the guitar. This is great for when you’ve advanced a little on the guitar, but it sure doesn’t help someone looking for easy to learn electric guitar lessons.

Tip no 2 – Make your guitar easier to play.

One of the main causes of beginner guitarists not having an easy time of it, is that their guitars aren’t set up properly for maximum playability. Whether you buy a brand new electric guitar or you’re learning to play on a second hand, hand me down, there are things that can be done to an electric guitar that will vastly improve its playability.

I don’t want to get into the whole technical aspect of guitar setup here, so I’ll just leave it at one simple solution. Get a guitar builder, or repairman to have a look at your guitar and set it up for you.

Now you’d think that a new eletric guitar would be set up automatically to be easy to play, but they’re not. The reason they’re only given the most basic of setups at the factory, is that it would take too much of their production time.

Tip no 3 – Buy a guitar lessons book.

Guitar instruction books are quite cheap. Sure, I know this is about learning to play electric guitar online, but here’s the plan: You buy a good guitar book with all the theory, pictures and information you need to learn how to play, and then if you want to learn more, or get more information on how to do a certain lesson, you do a search on that lesson and “video”.

That may seem like the long way around, but really, just getting all the materials together and then getting stuck in is a solid approach to learning how to play electric guitar.

Another option is to buy a physical book like the “For Dummies” guitar book.

There are some basic guitar lessons on my main site – Play-electric-guitar.net and those will be developing over time to become as comprehensive as possible.

Outside of these points, I think that’s a wrap for making it easy to learn to play eletric guitar online. Last but not least, just keep working at it. It may seem hard at first, but one day it all just falls into place.

Why learn to play electric guitar – Reasons, a lesson on its own.

While busy putting some lessons down for Play-electric-guitar.net, it became quite obvious to me that to help someone else “get” how to play electric guitar, I have to really examine every little thing that happens when I play guitar.

One of the first things that I realized, was that there’s a definite connection between strength and speed.

When I pick faster, the grip on my plectrum weakens slightly. Less strength and more speed. This brought to mind an article I read not so long ago about how too much of a grip on the neck of the guitar will slow down your ability to change chords fast, or execute fast lead runs.

A friend of mine has a terrible problem with this. If I give him my electric guitar to play, he exerts so much pressure on the fretboard that he pulls the strings out of tune. Needless to say, he’s not the fastest player by a long shot.

Not to put the fella down or anything – He admits it himself – But here we have a perfect example of an imbalance between power and speed. Too much power and no speed.

It’s my opinion that this comes from learning to play on cheap acoustic guitars with terrible action and heavy strings. If he’d learned to play on a decent electric guitar from early on, he wouldn’t have developed this problem.

He still plays a badly set up cheap acoustic steel string guitar with a high action and heavy strings, so I don’t think the problem will get solved anytime soon.

People need to understand that this is a bad habit that, once it’s embedded in your subconscious, is not so easy to break.

Parents buying their children guitars to learn to play on need to also understand that. The argument of “We’ll see how they do with it before we buy something better” may just be a reason in itself why they won’t get anything better.

Guitars can be nasty things to try and play, especially some steel string acoustic guitars, and some of them may be downright impossible to play.

Fortunately, an electric guitar is a lot easier to set up nicely, and with a little help from your local guitar repairman or luthier, at very little cost, can be made to play as well as some very expensive guitars.

Fast picking – How tight can you hold the plectrum?

It seems to me that your body is incapable of exerting the same amount of strength when speed is required. When you need to play faster, your muscles need to relax a bit to get the job done.

Case in point – Not so long ago I had to play the acoustic rhythm guitar to Pinball wizard. It’s kind of fast strumming. The plectrum kept falling out of my hand cos I couldn’t hold it tight enough. Mind you, it was kind of cold that day.

On the web page I recently finished – How to use a plectrum, I talk about how my fingers extend outwards slightly when picking fast, so as to get the job done. I think strumming all six strings at that speed might be a bit much.

Anyway, to wrap this post up for now, I’d have to say that, as a lesson in itself, if you learn to play electric guitar and you do it on a decent electric guitar, you give yourself a distinct advantage when it comes to practicing how to play fast.

It seems obvious to me that most beginner electric guitarists want to play guitars that look and sound like their favorite guitarist’s axe. For me personally, when I was about 14 or 15 years old, I was a big fan of Jimi Hendrix.

Naturally, I wanted a Fender Stratocaster. Then there was the Jimmy Page – Led Zeppelin addiction, so I wanted a Les Paul guitar.

For rock guitar, the Gibson Les Paul, or alternatively the Gibson SG are the most appropriate choices. Their solid mahogany bodies and necks, combined with powerful humbucking pickups are perfect for driving any valve guitar amplifier into warm ballsy crunching overdrive.

As far as guitar sounds go, the Gibson Les Paul and Fender Stratocaster are two opposite ends of the spectrum. The two most distinct sounding electric guitars that where the forerunners of every other electric guitar ever built.

In todays electric guitar manufacturing diversity, guitars either sound like one or the other, and sometimes halfway between the two with no distinct tonal character of their own. Not that that’s a bad thing.

An interesting thing about Les Paul, is that back in the early days when he was experimenting with the idea of electric guitars, and building various prototypes, he used the Epiphone factory as a workplace on the weekends.

He later took his electric guitar ideas to Gibson, who in an ironic twist, ended up buying the Epiphone guitar company.

Nowadays it’s possible to buy a Gibson Les Paul guitar, or a much cheaper Epiphone Les Paul guitar. The Gibson SG also has its Epiphone equivalent, the most accurate copy being the Epiphone G400.

Not so long ago I owned a beautiful Epiphone Les Paul which I got as part of a swap for one of my amplifiers and some cash at a music store. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a guitar salesman look sad when I walked out the shop with what was clearly his favorite guitar.

I think he wanted it for himself.

At that time Epiphone was advertising their Les Paul models as having either a mahogany or alder body, and they weren’t telling which wood you’d get of the two. Lately, I see they’re listing a number of their Les Paul guitars as having mahogany necks and bodies.

Here’s the list, and a reason for the list is that I regard mahogany as a phenomenal tone wood. So much so that I recently had a guitar custom built for me, made almost entirely out of mahogany

1. Les Paul 1956 Goldtop – This one has P90 pickups, so not exactly humbucking
2. Les Paul Black Beauty 3
3. Les Paul Custom
4. Les Paul Custom Plus – mahogany body with flame maple top
5. Les Paul Standard
6. Les Paul Plain Top – mahogany body with maple top
7. Les Paul Plain Top Plus – mahogany body with flame maple top
8. Les Paul Studio
9. Les Paul Studio Chameleon – These change color depending on which angle you look from
10. Then there’s the Les Paul Ultra and the Les Paul Ultra II, which have chambered mahogany bodies with quilted maple tops and maple necks.

Okay well…… You’ll notice that I’ve only included guitars with glue in, also known as “Set necks”. Apart from neck through body construction, a set neck provides the best neck to body join, which also adds to that classic Les Paul tone and sustain.

Some of these guitars definitely wouldn’t be considered as beginner electric guitars, like the Ultra and Ultra 2, but I’m really impressed that Epiphone have decided to make most of there Les Paul guitars exclusively out of the same materials that their Gibson counterparts are made of.

Something that you should know about the maple tops on Les Paul guitars is that tonally, maple has a resonance one octave higher than mahogany. This adds to the guitars ability to put out good harmonics. If you don’t know what that means – It just adds more treble, without taking away from the full rich tone of the mahogany.

What does an Epiphone Les Paul sound like?

Some time back I was asked to make a backing track of Sensitive kind, the Santana version.

Here is the intro guitar solo, done on my Epiphone Les Paul – Sensitive kind intro

At one of my gigs I was hounded repeatedly by a fellow guitarist begging me to swap my Epi for his Carvin Custom guitar. He said he was in love with the sound I was getting.

In an ironic twist, I later ended up selling the guitar to a friend of mine who has a music shop, and the customer who bought it from him was the same guy who ordered the backing track from me.

Electric – Rock guitars for beginners.

It seems to me that the Big Boys in the electric guitar manufacturing world have woken up. The Les Paul I got from Epiphone was quality through and through, and I think companies like Fender and Gibson realized a while back that unless you give a beginner guitarist a decent guitar to learn on, there won’t be that many of them around to buy any guitars later on.

All too often I hear from people that have tried to learn to play guitar, about how difficult it is to press the chords or progress beyond a certain point.

In most cases they’ve tried to learn guitar on something that could barely be described as a cheap knockoff, made by companies who’s only concern was to sell as many unusable guitars as possible in as short a time as possible to as many unsuspecting novices as they could.

My very first guitar was one of these. It was unusable, but for 19 bucks and a pretty finish, both myself, at the age of 12, and my mother where suckered in.

When it comes to rock guitars for beginners, I have two main recommendations.

Here they are.

You can click on any of the following pictures to get a bigger picture, user reviews and more info on these beginner rock guitars.

First choice beginners electric guitar for good rock tone.

Now I suppose you’re wondering why, after all that talk about the Epiphone Les Paul guitars, I recommend an Epiphone SG as a first choice for a beginner rock guitar?

Epiphone SG’s are called G 400′s.

It’s still got that great mahogany tone and set neck with humbucking pickups, but here’s the clincher for me…..

If you look at where the neck joins the body, there’s just an incredible amount of access to all the higher frets, unlike on a Les Paul where you’ve got this big bulky neck joint to contend with up there.

As a beginner guitarist that might not concern you too much, but a little later on you’ll really appreciate it.

On to number two.

2nd choice for a beginners rock guitar.

I’ve chosen these models specifically because they’re cheaper Epiphones without all the fancy quilted maples – which I love by the way, and extra trimmings, and because they’re guitars in the Epiphone range that have what it takes to last well into the future as trusted workhorses.

So yes, Epiphone does have cheaper electric guitars, but with these choices you can go from beginner to professional without stopping in between to buy a new guitar.

A guitar is worth so much more than the price you pay for it. When you’ve got something you’re proud to own that’s also a joy to play, it’s priceless.

I hope this post has been useful to you – Keep rocking.

Before you buy a beginner electric guitar, or throw your old one away.

I get a little troubled when I read a user review of a beginner electric guitar, and the reviewer badmouths the guitar, when I know for a fact that the guitar in question is a sleeping beauty.

There are quite a few entry level guitars that are actually of comparable quality to the expensive brands they copy. Some of them are actually made by the same company, as a cheaper alternative to their top of the range guitars.

Fender, for instance, has the Squier range, and Gibson has the epiphone range.

Here are a few things that just about any guitar should have done to it before being judged.

1.) The frets should be leveled and crowned before any comment on the playability of the instrument. This process brings all the frets to a uniform height above the fretboard, which eliminates most of the unwanted fret buzz and enables the strings to be set a lot lower. This process is best carried out by a professional luthier (Guitar builder)

2.) The intonation should be set. This is simply setting the bridge saddles on the guitar so that the strings play in tune all the way up the neck. This is quite simple to do, one just has to check that the note at the 12th fret is exactly an octave higher than the open string. I usually check this by playing the harmonic at the 12th fret and compare it to the fretted note.

If the fretted note is higher than the harmonic, I adjust the bridge saddle back, making the string length a bit longer, and vice versa.

Some beginner guitarists buy their first electric guitar and complain that it won’t stay in tune. Admittedly, some beginner electric guitars have cheaper tuning machines, but I’m still of the opinion that with due care and attention, even these can be made to stay in tune.

Here are some tips to help your beginner electric guitar stay in tune.

• When putting new strings on the guitar, try to have no more than 3 windings around the tuning post. This helps the string settle more tightly around the tuners – plus it’s a lot less hassle than turning forever trying to get all the string on.
• New guitar strings need to be stretched in. It’s just something about the metal actually stretching before it reaches the end of its elasticity. You can do this by holding the string down at the 12th fret, and gently tugging inbetween the 12th fret and the bridge – You have to be gentle, but not too gentle. I have broken a string or two like this, but that was from one set of strings a long time ago, and I think they where duds.
• Always tune up to the note, even if the string needs to be loosened to get to the right pitch. It’s better to go down below the desired pitch and tune it back up from there. This means the string tightens around the tuning post again as opposed to just being loosened.
• Make sure the frets are leveled and the intonation is set correctly. If the strings are too high off the neck fretboard, the extra distance when a note is fretted can cause the string to play sharp.

When looking at beginner electric guitars, or any electric guitars I’m interested in, here’s my main criteria before I buy.

1. Wood – Of utmost importance. The guitars tone comes mainly from the type of wood used. Everything else on the guitar will either compliment the tone or inhibit it. Don’t be fooled by the acoustic guitar enthusiasts who say that “Good wood equals good tone” doesn’t apply to an electric guitar. It most certainly does. Here are my favorite tone woods – Mahogany, Alder, Maple, and possibly Ash. There are some other tone woods that could be considered good quality, like Basswood, Agathis and Poplar, but they’re not woods I’ve really tried.
2. Pickups – The guitar pickups on cheap electric guitars have improved quite a lot in recent years, after all, the parts needed to make a good pickup aren’t expensive. I like to see pickups on a guitar that are made by a well known company, like for instance, Dimarzio pickups or Seymour Duncan pickup. Sometimes they may just be designed by them, which is also cool. If I’m looking at a Top guitar companies products, then I tend to be less worried about the pickups being brand names. Worst case scenario, I can always buy good quality but cheap replacement pickups from Kent Armstrong.

Decide beforehand what kind of music you want to play, then buy the right guitar for the job.

Too often I read reviews by beginner guitarists, who’ve bought a Stratocaster style guitar, and then complain that it sounds lousy, cos they’re into death metal or something, and the guitars not suited to that kind of music.

If you want to play heavy rock, you should buy a guitar with humbucking pickups.

If you want to play blues, then buy a semi-hollow or hollow body guitar.

If you want to play blues rock or country music, consider buying a stratocaster type guitar.

Here’s the kind of guitar I think offers an all round solution. A stratocaster type guitar with a humbucker pickup in the bridge position. This gives you the nice fat sound of a humbucker for playing rock, and that nice single coil twang in the other positions for playing bluesy stuff.

For the budget conscious, I think one of the best Fat Strats is the Squier.
I took the liberty of borrowing a friends Squier Stratocaster, so I could record some sound samples.
The guitar I borrowed wasn’t the Fat Strat, but the one with three single coil pickups. I was quite pleasantly surprised by the sound of this guitar.
I had always thought – And I still do – that single coil pickups in the bridge are not good for rock.
This guitar proved me wrong.
Here are the sound files.

Squier bridge pickup distorted mp3
Squier bridge pickup Distorted Solo mp3
Squier Clean sounds mp3
Squier neck pickup overdrive mp3

Hmm…… Looks like a Fender Stratocaster, sounds like a Fender Stratocaster, it must be a Fender Stratocaster.
Nope – It’s a Squier, and an Affinity series at that. The 2nd cheapest in the range, and it’s made from the same wood as some of the best sounding Stratocasters – Alder wood.

While I found the feel of the guitar neck to be a bit thinner and flatter than most Fenders, it was actually quite a fast action, and I took it down even closer to the fretboard. I hope Martin doesn’t mind.

Since I made this post, Fender Squier have brought out another model which is now Squier’s cheapest beginner electric guitar, which you can read about in my Squier Bullet Strat Review