Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition Masterbuilt Dave Murray Stratocaster Electric Guitar, Olympic White

For a monumental fiftieth anniversary celebration, we're getting hit with the massive sound and blistering speed of this Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition Masterbuilt Dave Murray Stratocaster. Murray, one of the driving forces behind heavy metal forefathers Iron Maiden, commonly turned to Fender guitars over the course of his career. Today's Masterbuilt model features a highly personalized design straight from Murray and built by Fender Master Builder Andy Hicks. Altogether, this limited edition Strat is a masterful example of two artists in collaboration working towards heavy metal nirvana.

In Fender Master Shop production, one of the tracks that you can choose to have your model built in is "Masterbuilt," meaning your guitar is produced by one of Fender's Master Builders, one-on-one, every step of the way. Today's Masterbuilt Dave Murray Stratocaster is Masterbuilt by Fender Master Builder Andy Hicks for a completely customized take on Murray's vision of a Strat.

This whole experience lifts off with a two-piece select alder body assuming Fender's iconic Stratocaster shape. Decked in a high-gloss polyester NOS White Olympic finish, this Custom Shop piece is sleek and clean with a cold-as-ice white color. The Custom Shop's high-quality select alder acts as an excellent sonic base from which the rest of this musical experience leaps.

Reaching out, this Strat features a unique walnut neck taking a Fender Custom Shop '60s Style Oval "C" profile measuring consistently from .800" thick near the first fret to .835" near the twelfth. With one of the Custom Shop's most popular and speedy profiles, this dark walnut neck is treated to an oil finish to accommodate Murray's need for speed. This profile and oil finish facilitate incredibly fast moves from the lowest, thunderous rhythm runs to the highest, screaming leads. A AAA rosewood fingerboard joins in this neck with twenty-one stainless steel Medium Jumbo frets. Balancing spaciousness and articulation, these frets help provide the precision Iron Maiden's most popular cuts demand. A compound fingerboard radius measuring from 9.5" to 14" from the nut to toward the body enhances this playability even further.

It's no secret that Iron Maiden's got the hits. It's also no secret that said hits come with plenty of dirt baked in. Luckily for this Masterbuilt model, this Strat comes equipped with a suite of electronics primed for such sounds. This Andy Hicks-built model is fitted with three specialized Seymour Duncan humbucking pickups. In the bridge and neck positions, this Dave Murray Strat has a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Strat SHR single-coil-sized humbucker. These two humbuckers are readymade for the kind of high-gain distortion inextricable from the Iron Maiden sound. Complementing these pickups is a Seymour Duncan JB Jr. SJBJ-1N humbucker in the middle position for balancing out the overall output with a smoother profile, when desirable. Fender Modern Stratocaster wiring shapes these pickups with a master volume control and tone controls for the neck and middle-position pickups.

Backing up this guitar's voice is a robust suite of hardware specifications. Centrally, the Dave Murray Masterbuilt features a Floyd Rose 1000 Series double-locking tremolo bridge. You don't need to be told twice what you can do with a Floyd Rose setup. Where this Floyd Rose bridge setup differs from your usual Floyd Roses is in the details. This Floyd Rose is supplemented by a number of particularly high-quality parts including an AxLabs Tone Claw locking spring claw, Heavy Duty Noiseless springs, and an FU-Tone brass block, tremolo stopper, titanium string lock screws, nut clamp screws, lock nut blocks, saddle inserts, and bridge posts. This selection of hardware pieces altogether assembles for an intonation and playability experience that clears the usual hardware goal posts and keeps on going. You don't get to fifty years with one of heavy metal's defining acts without good hardware, after all!

This Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilt Dave Murray Stratocaster travels with an included Fender Deluxe hardshell case, Fender Custom Shop guitar strap, and certificate of authenticity. This model is limited to seventy pieces worldwide.

As one of the leading guitarists in heavy metal, Dave Murray truly has a story to tell after fifty years in the limelight. Fitting that he gets a figure like Andy Hicks to translate such a story into a one-of-a-kind Stratocaster like this.