Blues guitar and the Fender Stratocaster...

[silky smoove]

as well as Bobby Patterson

I was surprised to see Bobby's name in a Talkbass thread, but then noticed you're from the PNW. My uncle Ken is Bobby's drummer. Every time I've seen them Bobby has been playing his green Les Paul. It wouldn't be my go-to for playing blues licks, but he always sounds great on it.

 

[marqueemoon]

Pickup selector switch positions 2 and 4 on a Strat have the bridge and middle or neck and middle positions out of phase. Early Strats had 3 way switches and players would try to get the switch to stay between them to get those sounds. Eventually Fender caved and made the switch a 5 way.

These sounds have a very distinctive character (a “quack”). There’s kind of a 3D quality, and it retains a lot of clarity when overdriven.

Strats are also good for switching between rhythm and lead playing. With a cleaner tone it stays out of the vocal range and you can punch up the mids with a pedal for soloing.

As a guitar player they’re not my thing tonally most of the time, but I think it’s why a lot of blues players like Strats.

 

[buldog5151bass]

I was just watching a video of a Crossroads blues festival. Buddy Guy, Clapton and about a dozen other guitarists on stage playing Sweet Home Chicago. Other than Johnny Winter, everyone was using a strat.

 

[Mildew Jones]

I recollect from reading Hendrix books that he preferred Gibson/humbuckers when he played blues songs. Of course there are exceptions, Hear My Train A Comin' I've seen with Strat, but when he played Red House, he used his V, and there are photos of him playing a Les Paul upside down (also had a white SG/Les Paul double cutaway, I've seen a Swedish tv performance he used that, I believe during Red House).
Just an observation, there certainly are incredible "Strat Blues" all about. Hell, Machine Gun, Band of Gypsys album is certainly blues, still by far IMHO his most incredible performance, his tone that night was perfection (gotta love tube amp/gain variability...not!), he tapped into something as deep as the center of the Earth for that 12 minutes or so.
MJ

 

[ajkula66]

I don't know...when someone says Strat + blues, this is who jumps right to the front in my mind...

 

[Guitalia]

Most of the American electric blues guitarists in the 1950s and early 1960s played Gibsons or Kays. For every Buddy Guy or Magic Sam, there were 10 guys playing semihollow Gibsons. Muddy Waters played a Tele.

Clapton said that it was hearing a Buddy Guy album (Hoodoo Man Blues) that converted him to playing a Strat. Before that, he'd been going for the sound of Freddie King and B. B. King: Gibsons into overdriven Fender amps.

 

[Spectrum]

Perception is a funny thing. My nest friend is a Strat guy. He's also great at blues. When he throws his Strat all the way to the neck pickup, it sounds fat, round, and HUGE. I would never dream of describing it as "thin". It's like he's playing lead on the upper frets of a four octave fretboard bass.

Thin compared to a humbucker I mean.