“Outta the box awesome... Pretty much an all around versatile guitar. It’ll only get better after I spend some time with it”: Jim Root on his new Strat

 Slipknot guitarist Jim Root took to Instagram over the weekend to talk about his brand new guitar – a Fender Player Plus Stratocaster.

He’s obviously very happy with it. Accompanied by a vid of him playing, he titled his post ‘Strataday’: “Getting the Player Plus HSS limited hard tail I ordered today. Outta the box awesome. I just adjusted the neck and dropped the strings (a bit too much… I’ll fix that later) and. Awesome.”

He continued: “12 degree radius and the humbucker gets “Iron Maiden-y”. The singles give you that saucy bluesy stuff. Pretty much an all-around versatile guitar. It’ll only get better after I spend some time with it.” 

Fender have been surprisingly hush-hush about this new Strat. There has been virtually no promotion around it and it’s a limited edition release that is only available through their website. 

But as Root noted in his Instagram post, it does have some incredible features. The humbucker is the Fender Fireball, and the single coil are the Player Plus versions of Fender’s famous Noiseless design. You got your regular five-way pick-up switch, but there’s also the coil-split feature on one of the tone controls with the push-pull action. 

Root, the main songwriter in Slipknot, has long been in the Fender camp. His main guitar is his signature Fender Tele, which he’s used since 2009. He also has signature Jazzmaster V4 and Stratocaster models too. All his main guitars tend to have two humbuckers, with a string through or hardtail bridge.

His signature Strat sports a mahogany body, his only choice for his signature models, a compound radius ebony neck and the gorgeous flat black finish, which provides it with a suitably metal-worthy appearance. 

He’s also has a signature Charvel, which he told Music Radar about back in 2022: “When I was growing up, all the guitar players that I was into were playing Jacksons and Charvels, and things like that – the Superstrat-y kind of guitars – and now it just so happens that Fender owns Charvel, so… The Fender thing was me being a traditionalist.”

“I like iconic things, y’know. Sunglasses? Ray-Bans, Persol, things like that. Jeans? Levi’s. Things like that. They stand the test of time. What’s the saying? The classics never go out of style.”

Whether this new Strat – which at £964 is an investment, but n ot a crazy one - will ever ascend to classic status remains to be seen. For more information about it go to www.fender.com