Fender Custom Shop Limited Wildwood 10 Relic-Ready 70th Anniversary 1954 Stratocaster

Wildwoodians, thank you for making Relic-Ready Custom Shop Fenders such a massive success! Your support has allowed our friends at Fender to really break new ground and create something fresh, exciting, and bold. However, given that the concept of a "Relic-Ready" finish is relatively new to the world of guitars, we wanted to add some notes to clarify what you should expect from a Relic-Ready instrument.

Relic-Ready finishes are much, much different than NOS finishes because they only have three or four layers of clear coat. Because the finish is so incredibly thin, Relic-Ready instruments begin the natural relic-ing process the moment they are fully assembled. Since these finishes are designed to wear quickly, sometimes Relic-Readies arrive at our shop having already begun their journey to vintage mojo. So, you can expect things like light dings, small spots where the finish has burned through, light scratching, and checking in the neck pocket. However, you can be assured that your instrument will NOT have any full-body checking from weather, deep scratches, or major dings/blemishes. As always, if you'd like more information about the condition of each particular serial, please don't hesitate to reach out for an in-hand description.

With Relic-Readies, our idea was to allow the player to write their own story into the finish of each guitar. But, sometimes the process of getting the guitar to you adds a little foreword to the finish to help you get started. For more information about all things Relic-Ready, read on!

Relic-Ready to Rumble

Over the years, Wildwood Guitars has sold thousands of relic’d Fender guitars. The incredible response that we’ve gotten from our Wildwood Tens is proof that most of the guitar-playing world loves instruments that marry modern convenience with vintage look, feel, and sound. We’ve also learned that there are plenty of pickers out there that like the distressed vintage look, but feel a little strange about playing a guitar that they didn’t relic themselves through everyday use. For these guitarists, each ding and scratch is a punctuation mark in the story of their instrument, and they want to be in charge of what happens in the tale of their axe.

Obviously, this is easier said than done. If you want to make an NOS finish look vintage through good ‘ol fashioned playwear, you usually have to play it for so long that it actually becomes vintage in the process. You could put your guitar in a trash bag of burned leaves and relic it yourself like one of my coworkers, but your house will smell horrible the moment you bring it inside. Frankly, few people have enough resources, energy, or training to make it look as good as the Fender Custom Shop’s builders can.

So, these players have been in a pickle until now. How do you make a new guitar look vintage without having to wait thirty years or resort to crazy schemes involving bags of burning leaves? Well, we at Wildwood Guitars are proud to introduce our answer: a new line of Wildwood Tens that we have dubbed “relic-readies.”

These Custom Shop creations are just like the heavy-relic guitars that have been a shop staple for years—same wood, same electronics, same hardware, and same outstanding build quality—except we snatch them away from Fender before they have a chance to actually do the relic job. The result is a guitar that accumulates wear-and-tear at an exponentially higher rate than normal. So, it’ll look like a guitar that’s been gigged for thirty years after just a couple birthdays. Finally, YOU can be the one to make your guitar look vintage!

After playing and ogling the first batch of these guitars, we feel confident that this line is easily one of the coolest collaborations in the history of our friendship with Fender’s Custom Shop! At Wildwood, we’ve been doing our best to tell our guitars’ stories as faithfully as we can for thirty-four years. Now, we are excited to step aside and give the reins to our exceptional customers. What sort of interesting tales will you carve into these finishes? We can’t wait to find out with you!

The Perfect 10

Years ago, we approached our friends at the Fender Custom Shop with a proposal: would they build us guitars that combined the mojo of a true-to-vintage reissue with modern handfeel and comfy modern ergonomics? They were enthused about the idea, and the Wildwood 10 was born. Thanks to the Custom Shop’s incredible craftsmanship and artistry, these guitars look gorgeous, sound killer, and play like butter.

Each of these Custom Shop creations features a thin fifties-style nitrocellulose finish, which allows the voice of the resonant hand-selected tonewoods to shine through. They also have hand-wound Custom Shop pickups that are sure to inspire you to reach new heights on your sonic journey. Wildwood 10s feel great in your hands, too. Their modern 10” radius is suitable for a wide variety of styles and techniques, and their 6105 narrow-tall frets allow you to expend less energy with your left hand, especially when bending strings. To top it all off, they come with a limited edition Dealer Select Wildwood 10 hardshell case and a certificate of authenticity.

From '54 'Til Infinity

Most products that were invented in 1954 have faded away by now. Our society has gone through half a dozen periods of social upheaval, multiple wars, and several financial crises since then, and our day-to-day life looks nothing like it used to. Technology has progressed at such a rapid rate since then that even the fifties’ most space-age designs became obsolete in a couple years. Yet despite all the change that occurred on this ball of dirt and water over the last six decades, one thing has remained constant: the Fender Stratocaster.

The Stratocaster’s longevity is a testament to the brilliance of Leo Fender’s original design. Originally, Leo wanted the Strat to be Fender’s flagship high-end guitar, and he put an immense amount of research and development into making it the best ax on the market. It went through two years of refinement before Leo finished the first small batch in 1953, but the tremolo system made the guitar sound like “an amplified banjo with no sustain” according to early beta-tester Bill Carson. Rather than put out a product he wasn’t satisfied with, Leo retooled his factory and took another crack at designing a better vibrato system.

The resulting revolutionary “floating tremolo” tailpiece is an excellent example of why the Stratocaster has withstood the test of time. Leo Fender designed the Stratocaster’s bridge thinking it would be used for gentle bends and narrow vibrato, but he did such a good job overdesigning it that it was able to handle Jimi Hendrix’s rampant whammy bar abuse during the psychedelic seventies and Kurt Cobain’s on-stage freakouts during the noisy nineties. The basic design of the Strat never had to change, because Leo got it right the first time.

Of course, genius is rarely understood in its own time, and the guitar-playing world initially dismissed the Stratocaster as a novelty instrument. That all changed in 1957 when a young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a hiccupping falsetto named Buddy Holly played one during a performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Then, the music world caught a fever for the Stratocaster that spread all over the world. Across the pond, Shadows’ guitarist Hank Marvin brought the first Stratocaster to the UK and infected countless British youths with Strat fever. Around that same time, a young surf guitarist named Dick Dale was experimenting with tremolo picking on his Strat, and an upstart blues guitarist named Buddy Guy realized that the blues sounded extra-sweet on a Strat. From then on, there was no stopping Leo’s iconic guitar.

Most design aspects of the Stratocaster haven’t changed at all since then. It’s an utterly timeless guitar, and that’s why you see musicians from all walks of life and genres playing them. Clapton aficionados, Jeff Beck enthusiasts, garage rock dudes with Iggy Pop tattoos, and Yngwie’s shred disciples all love the Strat. Its tone works in every genre from metal to pop to fusion, its contoured body makes it comfortable to play for long gigs and endless recording sessions, and (most importantly) it’s still cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.

Cool is hard to quantify, but we guitar players know it when we see it, and the Fender Stratocaster has it in spades. This may be Leo Fender’s greatest triumph, actually—he designed a guitar that is just as appealing to sixteen-year-olds in 2024 as it was in 1954.

Now, Wildwood Guitars is proud to honor Leo Fender’s legacy by offering a truly special Wildwood 10 Limited Edition 70th Anniversary '54 Strat for our exceptional customers. These guitars are meant to build upon one of the most storied legacies in the history of lutherie, and we are confident that they will be as iconic seventy years from now as they are today.