Leaderboard

Ah, it is a fine balance between looking cool and being comfortable. ... there is a reason that a stratocaster has been around for over 50 years.

Welcome aboard! Re: learning, go with music that you really like. Find a song that isn't too hard and explore how far you can go with it. See how close to the guitarist you can sound. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. Most of us have followed down this path.

I have also heard that. I did have an Encore very similar to the one in the original post and it was very nice, certainly for a beginner guitar. I carried on playing it even after I had progressed onto a Fender, it was just as good to my inexperienced ears. I only sold it because I became embarrassed by playing it instead of my Fender. I am not as worried by that image now and take a great delight in playing my homebuild Strat with Squier neck and a couple of Vintage VZ99 Zip guitars from the mid 2000s, one like a Danelectro with lipstick pickup, and another the same but with a humbucker. Brilliant guitars, irrespective of price and I love it hen people turn their noses up at it and then I play it with the band and you get a grudging shrug of 'it's actually pretty good...'. So to sumarise, the Encore and Vintage brands are good quality overall and perfectly nice guitars.

Yeah, the dear old Strat is a design I keep coming back to. What I love so much about it is it's so iconic, and yet the design was, in the first instance, very much about form following function, which produced such a beautiful form. Says a lot too how it's been so adaptable over time for all sorts of different tweaks (chamfered neck joints, different trems and pup combinations, and all the rest of it), yet still remained identifiably a Stratocaster.

I agree with @Dad3353, this seems like an overly complex way of switching and definitely a danger of switching everything off by mistake and causing an issue. It would be a much easier job to wire in a fresh decent 5 way switch, or even one of the fancy 7 way 'Gilmour mod' switching options that give ability use bridge and neck pickups together etc with a push pull pot. There will be wiring diagrams online and it can't be that hard to do (or just buy a replacement harness that will also then upgrade the Squier control pots)

I'm a newbie to the guitar world, daughter picked out a harley benton explorer, that is not a comfortable guitar at all... I bought a squier strat last week and that is so much easier, really light in comparison and very easy to sit with comfortably!

That is it exactly. I love the Esquire, much prefer it over a standard Tele. And I love the shape and look of the Strat but struggle to get tones I like from it, so I took apart my Hank Marvin Squier and used the neck on a hardtail strat body which I sprayed satin Fiesta red, no laquer so that it will age more and get dinged. Love it. Although, now I see the prices that the HM squier are up for on eBay, I often think that I might have made a mistake, but I love the neck to pieces, so comfy...!