Imperfect Tools or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Squier

One of the problems with moving around a lot, especially overseas, is that you can’t take all your toys with you. For me, that means musical equipment. I’d love to be able to bring multiple guitars, a synthesizer or two, a large MIDI keyboard and a variety of microphones and handheld percussion with me every time I travel. But that would be silly.

When I moved to Japan, I brought my acoustic guitar and one good condenser mic, as well as a portable audio interface. That really can be more than enough to scratch the creative itch and plug most musical holes, but sometimes you need a little more. I recently wanted to record some electric guitar for a project I’m working on, so I decided to buy a cheap, used model from one of the many, great secondhand stores found all over Japan (in this case, “Hard Off”, which sounds a lot dirtier than it is). They’re amazing places, offering everything from old cameras and 1st-generation iPods to rows and rows of anime action figures. They also don’t have the stench of exploitation and desperation that makes you feel icky whenever you walk into a pawn shop in the US or a Cash Converters in Australia.

I picked up a Squier Stratocaster, the stalwart of the cheap-but-functional range. Ask your typical guitarist what they think of a Squier, and you’re bound to hear some scoffs and see some eye rolls. Most of us have a love/hate relationship with them—we have owned them at some point and they’ve played an important role in our development, but we still look down on them.

In some ways, the Squier Strat is an emblem of late-20th-Century capitalism. An original design by innovative American craftsmen from the 1950s, helped by the largesse of US corporate power to scale up and expand, then coming to define popular culture for a generation, and ultimately using that cultural cache to replicate production, cut costs and maximise profit.

The Squier is the “budget” model offered by Fender, the most prestigious electric guitar company in the world. A Squier is like a knock-off, except it’s approved of and sold by the original company. It shares the look and the basic design of a Fender, but it is made with cheap parts in cookie-cutter fashion at the cheapest factory available.

VC Squier had originally been a string manufacturer, which was bought by Fender in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, just like most American manufacturing at the time, Fender was having trouble competing with the Japanese. Brands like Fernandes and Greco were making very passable electric guitars at a fraction of the cost, so Fender decided to bring back the Squier name, use some of those same Japanese factories and build their own budget guitars there. They would look the same and feed off the coolness factor of the Strat and the Telecaster, but would essentially be a lower-standard product.

By the late 1980s, production expanded to Korea, which was even cheaper than Japan. In the nineties, the era of NAFTA, Mexican factories came into action. By the 2000s, there was China. And as each of those countries’ economies expanded, they have mostly outgrown the Squier brand. But in the process, they have made a mark on millions of young guitarists’ lives.

To an economist, a Squier is probably a much more important and impressive product than a Fender. It has employed more people around the world, lifted many of them out of poverty and has allowed substantially more people at the margins to engage in their hobbies.

A Squier is also, to be frank, not a bad guitar. Yes, it “feels” cheap. The wood on the neck doesn’t glide through your palms as you slide up and down the fretboard the way it would on a Standard Fender. The electronics can buzz at times and it’s not always easy to keep them in tune all over the neck.

But that’s okay. In fact, that can be a bonus if you look at it the right way. Creativity is about the choices you make, and physical limitations are one of the best ways to force your hand into making interesting creative choices.

You can’t keep a chord in tune? Great, then don’t play chords! Play single-string motifs. Or just hit one note, again and again. But hit it hard and hit it in time. Make James Brown proud!

The lead jack buzzes when you touch it? No problem. Put some long reverb and a grain delay on it, fiddle around with the parameters and see what kind of post-apocalyptic soundscape you can create.

Imperfect tools make for unexpected choices. And unexpected choices are the key to both music and interesting storytelling.