I bought my showmaster for a guitar to have at work so I could play on mu lunch break and am pretty happy with it. I really like the quality of the fit an finish, the wider neck is excellent and the looks are much better than most guitars in the under 1k price range. I have been playing LPs for a long time and this guitar falls fairly short of the fullness and output of the Paul standards, but at four times the price this is the way life is. I do highly recommended this as a nice guitar for the market it seeks which is the intermediate player or backup guitar. I have been playing a long time and feel I will keep this guitar for the long run, and my 17 year old shredder son like it as well.

I have played guitar for over twenty years and fender went over and under my expectations on this model. The guitar as far as body and finish are absolute art. Most, don't know that this is a neck thru body design with a stained gloss finish on back of the neck with abolone dot inlays. fingerboard and action are smooth,low and fast..bout 9.5 10" radius.The neck is a thinner c-shape. Tall, wide jumbo frets similar to bass. Bridge and saddle, perfect for hand rest and palming, saddles feel very comfortable and are grooved unlike the strat style saddles. Yes this will go out of tune if you dive bomb. It's simple for those who don't know and understand..if it is not a locking system it won't stay in tune (Steve Vai/satriani apprentices). The floating bridge without the bar will stay in tune with hammer pulls and bends and is very nice. The sound of this guitar is beautiful, much resonance and sustain (with correct setup and amp).I play thru a vintage crate. The twin Seymors give good crunch in the bridge position and good solo/blues tone in the neck position. Good sound but not a wide tonal spectrum. If your into volume swells forget it..the v-knob is awkwardly positioned under the bridge rather than the pickup. To me that is a serious design flaw. One more thing on mine, the bridge and pups are not perfectly squared with the fingerboard. This dissapoints me however does not effect sound or playability. Finally the headstock is not the color pictured online nor the fender logo. The color is actually the stained color on back of the neck with a siver/gray logo color on the headstock..another dissapointment to me.I own a mexican standard strat, korean showmaster, and a chinese squier strat...believe it or not, out of the box set up the squier hands down was the best.Overall this is a very nice guitar. This guitar has a different feel than a strat however is very plesureable to hold and play. This guitar is perfect for Blues and Rock but will very much Play Metal as well. I recommend it to fender lovers old and young.

I have played guitar since the Beatles invaded the US. My original guitar, an original '54 Stratocaster, is too valuable to play away from home, so I decided to buy something for gigging. My current band plays mostly classic rock, anything from the 50's to the 80's, so I need to get a variety of sounds. This guitar provides that handily. I am very happy with the Duncan pickups, and very pleased with the two intermediate pickup settings that get very close to the out-of-phase Strat mid-position setting. For newer material, the Duncans provide plenty of signal for overdriving my amp (an early SF Twin Reverb). The neck is one of the most comfortable I've ever played. This is not a Custom Shop guitar, but the workmanship is very high quality. At its current price, this guitar is a steal. I recommend it highly.

Showmaster guitars suck. Most Fenders are good but this Showmaster could be WAY better. Basswood body? come on; it seems like Fender wanted a guitar that looked great but sounded like you-know-what. Theres is little to no sustain because of the basswood body, the tremelo syatem moves too rapidly; one pickup crapped out on me and never started working again. After a few days of trial and error I sent it back and bought a Vintage Series Telecaster.

I've been seriously playing guitar for a little over a month now, but I played my friend's Showmaster before I was ever serious about learning (I used to just pick at it). But it's probably one of the smoothest guitars I've ever played on other than an Epiphone Les Paul; your fingers will litteraly fly on this thing. Great tone, the pick-ups sound nice, it's a great guitar for anyone into anything from rock, blues, metal, jazz, or anything basically!