The Best Modern S Type Under $1,000

We all aware of the myriad guitars offered until multiple labels that seek to deliver the feel and tone of early Fender Stratocasters, including those from Fender and its side label Squier. Plenty to choose from, but what more modern interpretations of the Fender Stratocaster with HSS pickups and new design components. We can like vintage like instruments but no matter how relic’d they are, they are still not vintage.

When we look to modern S interpretations by top line builders such as Tom Anderson or Suhr, we tend to find a humbucker in the bridge position and single coils in the middle and neck positions. However not everyone is willing to spend $5,000 and up so I decided to look at modern S style guitars under $1000 CAD. Recent price increases have pushed Fender’s Mexican builds up over the $1,000 mark which while expensive is not inconsistent with other options from other vendors. The Squier family has two HSS Stratocasters, one in the Bullet line which is designed to come in under $300 CAD, and the Classic Vibe Vintage 70’s Stratocaster. I can never counsel a Bullet, they are best for turning someone off playing. The Classic Vibes are generally very good value but have gloss neck backs and pickups that tend to get replaced for good sounding ones. You could still buy a Classic Vibe, replace the pickups with something decent and be around $1,000 but I wanted to find something that was excellent and that did not require a bunch of parts upgrades.

Sire is best known for their basses, specifically their Marcus Miller signature series. I’ve never played a bad one and own a 7 series fretless bass that is amazing. Sire also does guitars both electric and acoustic, and we go to the Larry Carlton S7 series to find the answer to the question.

Larry Carlton Signatures

Larry Carlton is one of the most highly respected session guitarists in the world. When he agreed to put his name on Sire guitars, it was a requirement that he specify design and parts elements, not just get paid to use a decal with his name on it. While Mr. Carlton is known as Mr. 335 and Sire’s 335 style offering is an incredible guitar for the money, you may not know that the Larry Carlton signatures also include S models that are like modern design Stratocasters and L models that are like modern design Les Pauls. There is an S7 Vintage version with three single coil pickups but in this article we are going to look at the regular Larry Carlton S7 which is a hum single single configuration.

Wood

Many offshore guitars are being built with what I will generously call furniture drawer wood. The new PRS Silver Sky SE is made from poplar. Poplar, on its best day is a utility wood, used for drawer sides and backs. It’s not a tone wood. The Sire S7 is made from solid Alder. Fender enthusiasts will know that Fender used Alder for years in their US built guitars and only stopped using it in general in 2021. Alder is a great light to medium weight tone wood that works very well for solid body electric guitars. The Sire S7 neck is solid maple in what is called the Roasted Maple configuration. This is exactly what it sounds like. The maple blanks are roasted in an oven. This process increases the stiffness a bit and also tightens the neck’s resonance. There is the side effect of the roasting darkening the maple to a medium brown from maple’s normal nearly white look.

Pickups

The pickups are Sire’s own with what Sire calls the Super ST set consisting of a humbucker in the bridge, and a single coil in the middle and neck position. There is the expected five way switch. Positions 3 and 5 are individual single coils, position 1 is the humbucker alone. Position 2 is the bridge and middle together which delivers a very Strat like tone, albeit a bit thicker. Position 4 is the so popular neck and middle combination sometimes called the Goldilocks tone because it is “just right” In a side by side comparison with one of my US built Strats, the Sire and the Fender sound very much alike. The differences are subtle and neither is better nor worse than the other. I like the sound of these pickups.

Controls

Controls are one volume and one tone along with the five way pickup selector. There are no coil taps or push pulls here, just basic straight forward pots. Some might wish for a coil tap on the humbucker and if you do, you can mod this or look elsewhere. For me, I find single coil bridge pickups in general are either wound too hot and get spiky or just have a weak overall tone. The exception is the very vintage underwound options, but this is not designed to try to be a 60 year old guitar. The humbucker has great tone and is very clean, but if you push it can push the right amp into overdrive or you could use it clean with a pedal. I got great OD tones out of the Sire S7 with all pickups using a Diamond J Drive, a Hudson Broadcast and a Wampler Tumnus as testing options. I don’t seek anything more.

Bridge

The bridge is a two point tremolo with a smooth and simple push in mount. However, do note that there is a grub screw to hold the arm in place and to stiffen the rotation of the arm in the mount and the 1.5mm hex key does not come with the guitar. Not an issue for me, but could be annoying for others. The tremolo (which we all know is really a vibrato) is very smooth and returns to pitch nicely, testament to the quality of the bridge saddles and the nut work. The nut is natural bone. Guitarists who live on the trem, like Jeff Beck or those who want to play like Jeff Beck may choose to upgrade the nut to something like an LSR roller nut, and while I have one on my very customized old white Strat, nothing happened while playing the Sire S7 to say that the factory nut was an issue.

Neck

Scale length is a Fender standard 25.5 inches and the fretboard radius is 9.5 inches, the same as on modern Stratocasters. Sire does what I think is the best factory non Custom Shop rolled fretboard edges in the industry. The C shaped neck with the rolled edges is a joy to play and there are no sharp frets at all. I have picked up substantially more expensive instruments with considerably less palatable fretwork. The neck attaches to the body with a four bolt system.

Tuners

It’s a known reality that traditional tuners with a tremolo bridge can be a tuning challenge. The Sire S7 comes stock with premium grade locking tuners that are very smooth and help the guitar stay in tune if you are using the trem a lot. I don’t know what the factory strings are. They are better than Fender stock or Gibson stock strings but as with any guitar, I would replace them with strings that I know and love when I bought the guitar.

Colours

The colour palette options are Antique White, 3 Tone Sunburst or Sherwood Green. In prior years there was a natural that is no longer listed. The pickguard is a 3 play pearloid white on all colours. My evaluation guitar is in Sherwood Green and the factory site does not do justice to the richness of the colour. It’s a very California car colour that has very small metallic flecks in it. Not giant metal flake and not candy coloured but really nice while remaining subtle.

Base Tone

I always play guitars not plugged in to see how they sound naturally. The Sire S7 has a nice overall tone with good body sustain and resonance. My tap test revealed a nice clean ring that wasn’t muddy. Alder sustains well for such a light wood. For my plugged in testing and to feed the interface for recording, I used my Victory Viscount through a Two Notes Captor X. For those who do not know, the Viscount is basically the 40w Duchess in a combo housing with a 12” Celestion Creamback. It’s a lovely little amp and I get more out of it now by turning the guitar down and the amp up. It’s really quite nice sounding and works a charm with the Sire S7

Time to Play

The Sire S7 is incredibly comfortable and there was no time required for me to fit myself to the instrument. I play many different scale lengths and have been caught with a guitar needing fit time, where an unwatched D chord is actually some kind of D# abomination. It’s a bit of a silly thing but it’s something that I have noticed over the years. The neck feels awesome. I find gloss finished necks sticky and even some matte finished necks need some playing in time or some aggressive polishing to make them smooth and comfortable. The roasted maple of the Sire S7 is perfect out of the box and I absolutely love the nicely rounded fretboard edges. String spacing is great even for my short sausage fingers and even those long stretch chords are no problem as the C shape is neither too thin nor too deep. Access to the higher frets is easy that portion of the body is gently relieved to make it easy. Not quite as aggressive as a Fender Stratocaster Ultra, but better than what I find on the Player and Player Plus series or the Squiers. The body finish is I believe polyurethane as it has that look and does not have the eau de nitro fragrance. It seems tough enough, but also isn’t four miles thick as is found on other instruments in this price range.

The pickups sound very good. I’ve made a quick recording of some chords in each pickup switch position. The amp is the Victory Viscount in voice one (Fender Blackface) and the cabinet is from the Torpedo Captor X emulating a blackface Princeton 1x12 cabinet. I recorded this direct from the Torpedo direct into the Apollo Twin X with no plugins on the input side at all. For virtual microphones I selected a Beyerdynamic Ribbon 160 on axis and close to the virtual cabinet and an AKG 414 off axis but still close. I added the Two Notes plate reverb for a bit of space instead of the Victory’s built in spring, simply because I use plate reverb most of the time.

Pickup Switch Samples

In this short recording, I used the Sire S7 in all five pickups positions, starting in position 1, the bridge then working my way up to position 5 the neck with two runs of the simple chord sequence for each position.

Volume on the guitar was at 5-6 with the tone up full. I find that this allows me to turn the amp up more and get more of the amp sound than if the guitar is fully cranked and I have to turn the amp down to avoid annoying others. Getting setup, I used the speaker in the Victory with the Torpedo attenuator in play, and disconnected the Victory speaker for recording so as to not give me another sound outside the monitoring headphones.

I keep most of my amps set up for clean tones and add overdrive via pedals most of the time. Where I have an attenuator, I may turn the amp up as well as use the guitar volume to make overdrive, but I personally find I keep turning the volume up and reducing the level of attenuation until the complaints start. A loud amp pushing a lot of air is a wonderful thing.

In this case, I used a Diamond J Drive initially, but found that as happens, I ended up liking the driven tone better with this guitar and the Hudson Broadcast. The Hudson is a wonderful overdrive pedal once you figure out that it is wired right to left but that the knobs work left to right. There are a couple of short samples of the overdriven tone here.

Overdrive Samples with the Hudson Broadcast

In this simple sample, I used position 4 on the Sire S7 running into the same Victory amplifier and using the same virtual cabinet and microphones from Two Notes. I turned off the Two Notes plate reverb and instead used the spring reverb tank that is built into the Victory.

I have the good fortune to have been able to add a number of guitars over the years and to play a great many more. Prior to the pandemic, I enjoyed going to a friendly local music store and playing different guitars to see how they sounded and felt. As I don’t want to be a nuisance, I always tune up first and if I plug in at all, I do so at low volumes. I need to hear things. The rest of the store doesn’t need to and the other customers probably don’t want to hear it either. This practice as well as being very careful with stuff that I have not owned and keeping my playing time to a short period per guitar as allowed me to foster relationships with the store leaderships that makes them comfortable when I come in. It’s not reasonable for a guitar shop to do setups on everything as it comes out of a box, although every shop I deal with will do a setup when you buy a new guitar if you ask. This means that from time to time, you pick up a guitar that looks good and yet does not play well. Some arrive from the factory in such a state that you could be completely turned off. I have never picked up a Maryland built PRS and had an issue, although I cannot say that is true for some PRS SE models. As for Fender and Gibson, it’s a random dice roll. Sometimes a very inexpensive Squier is perfect and sometimes a Custom Shop model that is over $5000 makes you wonder if anyone at the factory even checked it. It also happens with acoustics but that’s a different conversation. Given how limited new guitars are these days, and in the face of constantly increasing price tags, I would hope that the makers would pay more attention to detail.

That’s an admittedly long path to my impressions of the Sire S7 out of the box. Intonation was excellent, action was appropriate to the 9.5” radius. I thought the action on the low E was a bit low for me, but it did not impact tone or playability. The high strings were excellent and while the fretboard is finished in gloss, it’s not soupy thick and feels good under the fingers. The frets are nice and smooth and bends don’t grab at all. The frets are not stainless steel as far as I can tell but are very well prepped to have that level of smoothness. I know that choice of fretwire is personal and that there are long diatribes about this on the Internet. I simply prefer stainless steel You should like whatever you like. My point is that the frets on the Sire S7 feel great. The tuners are also very smooth. In addition to being locking tuners, I do wish that Epiphone, Squier and Fender Mexico tuners were this good.

The pots rotate smoothly with no grabbing and no noise. The cable jack is on the bottom edge of the lower bout, as on a Telecaster or Les Paul instead of being in an angled cavity on the top. For me that’s a cosmetic thing first, although I prefer the cable jack where it is on the Sire S7 because I tend to use 90 degree angled plugs on the guitar end of the cable and this jack placement is very convenient. As I always use a strap when playing whether sitting or standing, it also makes it simple to route the cable so if I step on it, I don’t inadvertently yank it out of the guitar.

The pickups are quiet until you bring them into the presence of a strong magnetic field like close to a speaker cabinet, so like better single coils elsewhere. They are not stacked hum-cancelling as some vendors offer under terms such as vintage noiseless, that I and others tend to refer to as mostly toneless. Some will not like that there is only one tone control, specifically those coming from a guitar with a tone pot per pickup. That’s a fair criticism I think but not unlike my Suhr Classic S or my custom built Tom Anderson, both of which are HSS designs. Some may not like that there is no push pull, or push in to split the coils in the bridge humbucker. That’s also fair if you need that sort of thing.

My Conclusion

In order to prepare for this article, I played a lot of S type guitars with the caveat that before tax they were normally priced under $1,000 CAD. I chose the Sire S7 because it sounded best, had the best neck and was immediately playable. Fit and finish are superb, better than I have seen from guitars costing twice as much. It’s body is made from a proven tone wood and that roasted maple neck is so darn comfortable. I found that the bridge pickup had enough meat not to sound weak without a boost or drive, which is not common in the vintage design S types, most of which sound weak to me. I also very much appreciated the excellent locking tuning machines. It is, to my mind, the Best Modern S type guitar under $1,000 and to be blunt, the best modern S type guitar under $1,700.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.