What is the Best Budget Guitar to Modify?

Partscasters, Frankenstrats, Phoneycasters. These are all names used to describe a modified or pieced together Stratocaster or Telecaster guitar.

If you know me, you know my love of Fender Stratocasters. Over the years, I have owned many. I currently own two – a ’96 American Standard Strat and a true Frankenstrat/Partscaster made from pieces from the clearance section of GuitarFetish.com.

Here’s my American Standard Strat before and after a quick “facelift”.

And here’s the pieces of that Frankenstrat. I call it my “Coronacaster” because I had a lot of time on my hands during the first year of the pandemic. You can read all about that build here.

Now, my love for Stratocasters is rooted in two fundamental truths about the guitar:

1. They are incredibly versatile instruments – you can play jazz, metal, and everything in between on them.
2. They are built with easily modifiable components – you can replace really any piece that you want easily.

The component-first approach to the guitar design enables players to customize these guitars to suit their visual and audio preferences. And, if you are up for a project, building or modifying your first guitar can be budget friendly if you know where to look.

The best budget guitar to modify

In my experience, the hands-down best budget guitar to modify is the Fender Squier “Strat Pack” Stratocaster. Sometimes referred to as a Squier Strat SE, this guitar is a full scale Stratocaster marketed towards the beginner audience and is typically sold new in a bundle that includes an amp and a gig bag.

“Why is this such a great guitar?” you ask. Well, for starters, it has a full-thickness body and a full-thickness, C-shaped neck. The body is made of poplar, which is lightweight and similar to alder in tone (although the tone snobs out there might say it is not as exciting of a tone wood). Those components are the perfect combination for the bones, or husk, of your next mod.

How should you modify this guitar?

Now you have your guitar, what should you do to it? First off, let’s talk about what you should keep:

• The neck – it’s a sturdy maple neck with a Laurel wood fretboard.
• The body – again, it is full-thickness and is routed for HSS (Humbucker at the bridge and two Single coils).
• The tuners – they’re not the greatest, but they’ll stay in tune.
• The pickguard – these guitars come with a 3-ply pickguard unlike the “Bullet” series Strats
• Volume and tone pots and pickup selector switch – similar to the tuners, they’re not high end, but they’ll do.

Now, here’s what you should replace to get your mod playing and sounding best:

• Pickups – these are not great. Not even good. Investing in a higher end set of pickups will do wonders for your tone.
  • I’m a big fan of the “Pure Vintage” series pickups (I used them when I built my first Telecaster Partscaster). These Pure Vintage ’65 Strat Pickups are a fantastic upgrade.
• Bridge and tremolo block – this bridge is as low-end as you can get and the tremolo block is paper-thin
  • These have the 6-point tremolo connection and this Vintage Style Standard Series Stratocaster Tremolo Assembly should drop right in and be an instant (and inexpensive) upgrade.

After installing the new parts, you should give this guitar a good tune up as well. Level and crown the frets, file the fret ends, and intonate the guitar. I can’t stress enough how important it is to take care of the frets – you will feel and hear (i.e. fret buzz goes bye-bye) a major difference right away.

Now enjoy the fruits of your labor and your brand new modded Stratocaster!

Bonus tip:

Sand down the headstock to remove the Squier logo and replace it with a waterslide decal to give it an “authentic” Fender look. Then re-finish the headstock with Tru-Oil or a matte finish spray to seal it.

Happy Modding!