A couple months ago, I bought a Fender Deluxe Player's Stratocaster: http://snipurl.com/27iqint
I'm fairly impressed with it. I think it sounds great and feels great to play, and feels good to play too. One of its more interesting features is the toggle button that enables the bridge pickup along with the neck pickup or neck/middle setting, allowing all 3 pickups to be enabled at the same time. These two extra settings have a nice sound.

Although the Fender Noiseless pickups in this guitar sound okay, I think there are other pickups that sound better. I replaced the pickups with a set of Kinman "Traditional Mk-III" noiseless pickups: http://www.kinman.com/guitar-pickups/stratocaster/#Traditional
I'm also not a fan of Fender Vintage tuners, so I had the tuners replaced with locking tuners. Now I think the guitar is even better. It sounds awesome with the Kinman pickups.

I feel like this is a near-perfect guitar for me (with the modifications I've made to it). It sounds great, feels great to play, and I think it's one of the best-looking Stratocasters I've ever seen. I really like the transparent blue finish of the body along with the brown tortoise-shell pickguard and white electronics - The combination of the colors is great and looks crisp and clean. I was initially thinking of having a custom guitar built with a similar color combination, but that would have been at least twice as expensive.

The Deluxe Player's Stratocaster is a Mexican-made Stratocaster. I've heard that the American-made Stratocasters are made with better components and better workmanship, but honestly I haven't noticed a difference between the American and Mexican Stratocasters. This is the 3rd Mexican-made Stratocaster I've owned, and I have no complaints about their build quality. I don't play in a band and haven't taken my guitars to gigs though, so maybe there's a difference there.

Nightfox
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