Fender

“The Professional certainly feels like an old-school Strat. If you’re a veteran Strat player, chances are someone could hand you a Professional for the first time just as you stepped onstage, and you could play all night with barely a second thought, except perhaps to admire the quality and consistency of the guitar’s workmanship.
This build is excellent. The narrow/tall frets are perfectly installed, with smoothly rounded ends and a fast, sleek feel. The neck employs Fender’s “deep C” profile, which feels svelte where the neck edges meet the fretboard, but with substantial mass filling your palm. The gloss finish polyurethane is mirror-perfect. The rear of the neck wears a thin matte finish.

The Professional sounds great unplugged. The innate tone is airy and bright, with generous sustain and an attractively “hollow” acoustic-like resonance. The whole instrument just hums when you strum, thanks in part to an expertly carved and seated bone nut. The bridge employs vintage-style two-screw saddles, and the entire assembly rocks smoothly and consistently on its fulcrum points. The pickup selector is the traditional 5-way type.
Modern touches include contemporary Fender tuners, a sleek new string tree design, a “trem’” arm that snaps rather than screws in. But Fender also revisits the under-appreciated Micro-Tilt neck angle adjustment feature that first appeared on oft-maligned 3-bolt-neck Stratocasters and Telecasters from the early ’70s.
Another update is a modernized wiring scheme. On vintage Strats, there’s a tone control each for the neck and middle pickups, but none for the bridge pickup—one of several factors that gives the Strat bridge pickup a “hard to handle” reputation. Here, though, the first tone knob controls the neck pickup, and the second tone knob controls both the middle and bridge pickups. For most applications, this system makes far more sense than the original design. The tone pots are nicely voiced, too. You can get more-than-decent traditional jazz tones when you roll them back.

The Professional houses a trio of single-coils designed by Tim Shaw, which, according to Fender, feature “a proprietary blend of alnico magnet types,” though they offer no further details. Whatever their composition, the pickups provide vintage-approved sounds, but with a bit more treble openness. Everything balances beautifully (though part of that is due to the expert setup). The pickups’ pole pieces are staggered as on a vintage Strat.
Meanwhile, the volume pot is wired using the popular “treble bleed bypass” mod, which adds an extra cap and resistor between two pot lugs. That way, tones lose no treble when you lower the volume knob. After playing a vintage Strat for decades, I found the effect is a bit surreal—but I love it! The revised wiring might be an issue for the small percentage of Strat players who use the volume knob as a secondary tone control. But now you can get crystalline clean tones at lower volume knob settings, which means you can set your amp fairly hot and veer from clean to crunch via the volume pot.

The original Strat design is so iconic and beloved that you have to be cautious about referring to changes as “improvements.” With its updated wiring, pickups, and hardware, the American Professional Stratocaster may not be the best choice for hardcore Strat traditionalists. But the guitar will probably delight—uh—medium-core traditionalists, who will relish both its fine vintage-approved tones and the new possibilities afforded by the revised wiring. And there’s no denying the Professional’s universally fine build quality, zingy resonance, and richly nuanced tones.”-from PremierGuitar.com

• Gloss polyurethane Sienna Sunburst finished ash Stratocaster body
• Maple neck-satin urethane on back gloss on front
• Deep “C” neck profile
• 25.5” scale length
• 9.5 fingerboard radius
• 22 narrow tall frets
• Bone nut width 1.685” 
• Black dot inlays
• Bi-Flex truss rod
• 1st Generation, Tim Shaw designed, V-Mod pickups
• Master Volume(with treble bleed), Tone 1 and Tone 2 control knobs
• 5-position blade switching
• 2-Point Synchronized Tremolo with pop-in arm
• Fender Standard Cast/Sealed Tuning machines
• Ezy Glider string tree
• Nickel/Chrome hardware finish
• 3-ply Parchment pickguard
• Aged White plastic knobs, switch tip and tremolo bar tip
• 4-bolt “Corona CA” neck plate
• Deluxe Tolex covered case

This used guitar is in as near perfect condition as we’ve ever seen. The only sign of use is that the plastic pickguard film has been removed. Excellent+++!