2021 Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition Mike McCready '60 Stratocaster VV283

A Masterbuilt recreation of Pearl Jam guitarist, Mike McCready’s famous 1960 Stratocaster! 1 of 60 #VV283 and in like new, collector's grade condition. This Custom Shop tribute Stratocaster features an ultimate Relic lacquer finish on a two-piece alder body, flat-sawn flame maple neck with a 1960 “oval C” profile, flat-laminate rosewood fingerboard with 21 vintage frets, and it comes fitted with custom Josefina hand-wound pickups matched to McCready’s originals for an authentic vintage tone. An incredible build and a must-have for Pearl Jam fans! Includes original hardshell case, COA, and case candy.

"One of the Fender Custom Shop’s most ambitious replicas built to honor a longtime friend and customer of ECG. When it comes to Seattle music, it doesn’t get much more prominent or iconic than Pearl Jam. Their sound quite literally exemplified the 1990s and elevated grunge from a local scene to a global phenomenon. Nearly 100 million records sold since 1991. By any parameter, they are legends. At the very heart of the group sits Mike McCready, founding member and lead guitarist. Unwaveringly a Strat player, his well-worn 1960 model (long thought to be a 1959) has graced thousands of stages and can be heard on the era’s most defining recordings. In 2021, Fender set out to create a small number of painstakingly accurate replicas of his ubiquitous Strat, and pulled no punches in doing so.

To accomplish this Herculean task, Fender looked no further than their own master builder Vincent Van Trigt. At the Custom Shop headquarters, Mike’s original ’60 was disassembled and meticulously examined and measured. No scratch, ding, or contour was overlooked. These exhaustive details were compiled and referenced to produce a run of 60 guitars, all hand-built by Van Trigt, that would be as indistinguishable as possible from McCready’s original 1960. This is no small feat, especially considering the heavy wear the guitar has accumulated through the decades. The result, though, stands as a magnum opus of Fender’s greatest craftspeople. All three pickups were hand-wound by Josefina Campos, one of the world’s most esteemed and revered winders. Josefina was famously the sole apprentice of Abby Ybarra, Fender’s longest-tenured employee and patron saint of vintage tone. First hired at Fender in 1956, Abby spent a whopping 57 years at the bench winding pickups. Extrapolating her daily averages, it was calculated that she hand-guided enough pickup wire during her career to wrap around the earth’s equator 16 times. Ironically, it is likely Ybarra herself wound the pickups in Mike’s original 1960 Strat. All this work comes at a steep price, but I can’t think of a better-executed vintage replica from any shop in recent memory." ~ Tyler Geske, ECG Newsletter