(rock n' roll)
- Hey, it's John Dryer.
And what I have here is the Squier affinity
Stratocaster guitar pack.
Now the packs are really cool.
So if you're looking for your first guitar or
amplifier this has everything you need
to get started right away.
So include the guitar, the amplifier, gig bag, guitar cable,
guitar strap, and we even throw in guitar picks.
So we're gonna open this up.
We're gonna see what everything looks like.
We're gotta plug it all in.
and then we'll listen to some tones.
So let's get started.
And so once we open the outer box, here's what we have.
Let's take inventory.
So we should have your guitar in the box,
there's a gig bag as well as your amplifier
and then a little white box that has your accessories.
So we can look at this.
This should include your guitar cable,
the guitar strap,
and then we have a tremolo arm that attaches to the guitar
and I'll show that in a minute.
And then lastly, we have a little accessories bag here.
This includes a couple of Allen wrenches for you
to do adjustments on the guitar.
There's an extra spring for the tremolo
we can talk about later
and then a couple of fender guitar picks.
Pretty cool.
All right, so let's set everything up.
So time for the unveiling of the guitar.
Let's take a look.
This lid off here, drop that down.
The first thing you'll notice
is the brightly colored card here.
This is your fender play offer.
This is three months free on fender play.
So if you're a first time player,
this is a great place to learn.
If you're already playing,
this is a great place to just brush up on some skills,
so check that out.
I'll put that aside for now.
Let's open up the guitar.
All right, I think we have a brown sunburst here.
Let's check it out, okay.
Take that off.
(air whooshing)
There we go, there is your affinity Stratocaster.
Now, like any brand new guitar right out of the box
the guitar ship with a thin plastic film
over the pick guard to protect it from scratches.
So you might want to peel that back
and peel it off away from the pick guard itself to reveal
that nice, shiny-black pick guard.
All right, so I removed the plastic from the pick guard.
and the pickup and oh yeah, that looks great.
So let's drop this box out of the way
and then we can go through the parts of the guitar.
So let's start up at the headstock.
I'm gonna take these tags out.
So that those hang down.
So we can start with the headstock.
So the headstock is this part right here.
And then on the headstock
we have your machine heads, or tuners.
So this is how you tune the guitar.
And then we have your string trees.
This ensures we have the correct angle
of the strings over the nut.
And the nut is this thin piece right here.
And then we have the neck.
So this is the guitar neck.
The flat part up top is the fretboard.
We have your frets and position markers here
and then the neck is attached to the body,
and the body is this component.
And on the body we have your pick guard, pickups,
and in this case we have a humbucker
and two single coil pickups.
We have your bridge with six saddles.
And then your controls.
You have volume, tone for your neck and middle
and then tone for your bridge.
And then a five-way selector switch.
So this allows you to either select the pickups individually
or combinations of the three pickups.
And then we have your output Jack,
this allows you to connect the guitar to the amplifier
which I'll show you in a minute.
Also on the guitar we have your strap pins,
this is where you attach your guitar strap,
I'll also show you that.
And then on the back we have your tremolo cavity.
So in this cavity of the guitar,
we have the trem block which is attached to the bridge,
this is where the strings also feed through
when you change your strings.
we have three springs in here that attached to a claw hook
and that whole mechanism allows you to raise
and lower the pitch of the guitar with the tremolo bridge.
All right, so let's revisit that accessories box
that I showed you earlier
and you can pull out the tremolo arm, which we have here.
So you can see on the very tip
of the trem arm, it's threaded.
So that screws into the hole on the tremolo
and I can show you that right now.
So we're gonna insert it into the hole here on the bridge.
In the hole there, you'll feel it kinda fall into place
and then we're just gonna simply screw it in.
And then you can, you'll feel it tighten up.
You can either let it hang down.
It's really a preference,
if you want it to be out of the way the whole time
you can kind of let it hang down
and grab it when you need it,
or you can tighten it a little bit more
and then kind of position it to where you want it to be.
And that feels about right, right about there.
All right, so now let's put the guitar strap on,
I'm gonna take these tags off just 'cause
they're just in the way.
So drop those,
and grab my guitar strap from the accessories box.
Here we have your fender strap.
All right, so I prefer to have the fender logo
part of the strap out front.
So I'm gonna attach this end first.
So I'm simply gonna grab the guitar strap
and then wrap it around the strap pin, pull it up,
just to make sure it's on there
and won't come off.
All right, so the other end
will attach to the strap pin on the back of the guitar here.
Now this strap right out of the box
is a little too short for me so I'm going to expand it out
with this buckle pulling down.
I think that might be good.
Pick up the slack,
and wrap it around the shoulder here,
and then attach it to the strap pin,
and just make sure it's on there.
And then now, we're ready to play.
Looks good, now we're going to connect the guitar
to the amplifier using the instrument cable.
So, how this works,
We have one end
that goes into the output jack of the guitar
which is here on the guitar.
Simply going to plug that in.
All right, now the other end
goes into the input jack of the amplifier.
So we'll plug that in here
and there we go, that easy.
And while we're at it,
let's look at the features of the front man 15g amplifier.
Starting from the left side here, we have your input jack.
This is where we plug the guitar cable into the amplifier.
We have your normal volume,
that's your clean guitar tone level.
We have your gain control.
This is the amount of distortion on the distortion channel
and you can engage the distortion
with this button right here.
And this is your volume for the gain or distortion channel.
We have three band EQ.
We have treble, middle and base.
We have your auxiliary in,
so you can connect another audio device
to play along with some tracks.
We have a headphone jack for private practice
and then your on off switch.
All right, so let's turn the amp on we're all mic'd up.
We'll get some guitar tones going
but before we do that,
the ever important step of tuning the guitar.
Now there's a lot of different options to tune your guitar.
I like to use the fender tune app.
It's an easy download from the app store
and it's very easy to use.
All right, so let's turn the amp on.
Let me put this down on my knee here.
And we pretty much have a basic clean tone
going here with the amp right now.
(guitar string resonating).
And I do wanna mention I'm also gonna grab one of my picks
from the accessory package.
This is a fender medium
and then one more note before we get into tuning.
It is a good step to stretch your strings.
So if you're taking your guitar out of the box
for the very first time
or you just put a brand new set of strings on there,
you wanna make sure you stretch out the string.
So I'm just going to go through each string real quick,
and kind of pull on it.
Not enough to break it,
but just enough to take off some of the slack
that might be on the tuning pegs.
And you might have to do this a couple times
as you're tuning.
All right, so now let's go ahead and tune.
(guitar string resonating)
There's my E
Okay, moving on to my B.
(guitar string resonating)
And then lastly, the low E.
(guitar string resonating)
Sounds good, all right I'm gonna set my phone aside for now.
and we can talk a little bit about the guitar tone,
the sounds we can get out of the amp and guitar.
Now the amp is set clean,
I'm gonna dial in the EQ and set it flat,
which just means basically setting it in the middle there.
So around five or six on the base, middle and treble.
Okay then we have a tone that sounds something like this.
This is the neck pickup
(guitar twanging)
So the guitar has three pickups.
We have two single coils, a single coil in the neck,
a single coil in the middle,
and then this pickup here is what we call a humbucker.
And we call it a humbucker because it essentially cancels,
or bucks the hum that is normally associated
with single coil pickups.
And it's double the coils,
so double the output.
It's a warmer sounding pickup typically used
for lead guitar tone.
So let's run through the combinations of the pickups.
So we're set clean on the amp, here's your neck pickup.
(guitar twanging)
That's a nice bluesy, rhythm type tone.
We can go into position four.
Now you have the neck pickup and middle pickup.
(guitar twanging)
Position three is the middle pickup alone.
(guitar twanging)
Position two is a combination of the middle pickup,
and bridge pickup.
(guitar twanging)
And then of course we have the full on humbucker, quiet,
and double the output.
(guitar twanging)
And of course if you wanna rock out,
we can hit the drive select,
add some distortion,
have some fun.
(upbeat distortion guitar)
One last thing I wanted to note is that
you should keep your accessories bag handy
or at least know where it is at all times.
It includes your Allen wrenches that will adjust
your truss rod.
The larger one, adjusts the truss rod,
which is inside the neck,
it keeps the neck stable.
And then the smaller Allen wrench
adjust the saddles on the bridge.
And then we have an extra spring for the tremolo cavity.
And of course you have your guitar picks in here.
So just make sure you know where this is.
All right, well that was a lot of fun.
That was the Squier affinity Stratocaster guitar pack.
Everything you need to play guitar all in one box.
It has the guitar, the gig bag, the amplifier,
the guitar cable, the guitar strap,
as well as the guitar picks.
If you're unboxing your own pack at home
I want you to go have some fun.
As always, you can go to fender.com
if you have more questions,
and stay tuned here for more videos.
We'll see you.
(soft guitar melody)