Case Study: Buying Your First Superstrat at Two Price Points

One of the things you quickly learn about playing a Stratocaster is that you have to mind the limits of the tremolo.

Eventually, if you're tempted to get a guitar with a Floyd Rose-style tremolo, you have a decision to make: do you want something in the most accessible price point (~$300 to $700) to "try it out" at lowest risk, or do you buy the next tier up (~$900 and up) so you have a slightly more "pro-grade" instrument with at least a Floyd Rose 1000?

A Floyd Rose 1000 uses better materials (nickel-plated brass tremolo block, for example) than the Special (Zinc alloy tremolo block), so theoretically you get tangible benefits from spending a little more. But what does that mean in terms of owning one of these guitars? I'm never going pretend to have all the answers about buying guitars, but I think a couple guitars I bought last year provide an interesting case study here for guitarists dabbling in this area for the first time.

Since I was concerned that owning a guitar with a Floyd Rose special could end up being a quagmire (a floating/locked trem is not a simple guitar even when it's high quality), I ended up waiting until I was in the position to buy a Charvel with a Floyd Rose 1000 (Charvel Pro-Mod So-Cal Style 1 HSS FR E). And of course, there were several times I was tempted to buy something cheaper before then. And later, another bout of GAS led me to eventually acquire a Jackson X Series Dinky DK3XR used on Reverb for $380. A bargain? I don't know, but it's the price at which I was willing to forgive a Floyd Rose Special/Licensed and fulfill a stupid urge to buy something yellow and pointy. So, what's it like living with these guitars for a bit?

(note all prices are in US dollars and currencies may fluctuate a lot after I write this).

Why not buy a cheaper guitar and modify it?

You absolutely could start with the cheaper guitar and modify it. But I think you mess up the liquidity of the guitar when you do that (if you care).

This Dinky that I purchased is a great example of that. When I purchased this guitar, I was looking into a pretty narrow universe of specific Jackson models that had bright yellow. And this particular model has distinctive pink pickups. The guitar sat on reverb for a couple years before the price worked its way down and I found it. Liquidity was already not great, and if this guitar didn't have the stock pickups, I wouldn't have bought it at the price I did.

Modded guitars strike me as being the same exact trap as custom shop guitars: why is someone going to pay full price for your taste and specificity instead of their own?

I think there's a danger of buying a $400 guitar, putting hundreds of dollars of parts into it, and still only having a guitar that you would struggle to sell at $200. And it's not that I plan to sell any of my guitars, I just know that life changes, tastes change, space is limited, and sometimes surprise bills come. If you don't care about resale value or effort, then it doesn't matter.

What are some other guitars in the cheaper tier?

Just to make it clear, I'm mostly talking about guitars that have a Floyd Rose Special or a cheap licensed version.

Beyond my Jackson Dinky DK3XR, some other examples include ESP-LTD's KH-202 and the new JH-200 CTM (which I talked about in my coverage of their new guitars for NAMM 2026) . Jackson even has some in the ~$400 ballpark.

Notably Harley Benton does offer some guitars with a Floyd Rose 1000 in this price tier (that one is under $350 but Harley Benton is also pulling out out the USA with their official Reverb Store due to tariffs). But these Harley Bentons are priced to compete in this tier, despite their specs. I will come back to this near the end.

Body and neck quality/setup

I already knew I liked Charvel's necks generally since I also own a hard tail So-Cal. This part felt low risk even if I was spending a pretty penny for it. I like how fast it feels, but more importantly it feels really comfortable for me too.

The Dinky was almost perfectly in tune when I got it, which surprised me since the guitar was shipped up to me from Florida. Along similar lines, I didn't have any fret sprouting issues with this guitar either even though the guitar had plenty of exposure to dry winter air during transit.

Both these guitars feel great to me with a lot of playability.

Pickups/electronics

One of the benefits of opening up the budget a little bit with this kind of guitar is that you get some choice over pickups and configuration. Going into my purchase of the HSS So-Cal, I knew I liked the Seymour Duncan Distortion pickups already (from my HH hardtail Charvel). And I knew that I was pretty sure that I wanted HSS to give me more versatility.

The pots on the Dinky are scratchy, and you are also less likely to see no-load tone pots in this price range. This is a mod that disconnects the tone pot when it's set to 10 to avoid tone suck. You can call it a cork-sniffer upgrade if you want, but it's common on guitars like Charvel pro-mods.

The bridge humbuckers in both of these guitars sound great with high gain for metal or hard rock. But I think the SSL-6 single coils in the have more "character" (I'm sorry for using such a vague, useless term). They are definitely hotter than most other single-coils I've used while still being distinctly "Stratty."

Here's a clip I recorded of some noodling and switching between different pickup positions:

I realize, on its own, that recording is of limited utility. I was going to record a similar take with the Dinky, but I ran into issues.

Why isn't there a recording example from the Dinky?

Well, sometime after I recorded the demo above and before I tracked something with the Dinky, I ended up throwing it waaaaay out of tune:

It's not trivial to retune it at this point either (things can take a while once you unlock the nut), and I haven't gotten around to it now as I'm writing and making the decision to finish and publish. And even if it's partially a skill issue on my part, I think it does show that reliability and availability can come into play with these kinds of locking-trem guitars.

Additionally, I eventually ended up tearing down the microphone I used to record the take with the Charvel, which revealed a flaw in my methodology. If I am just trying to shoot out 2 guitars (or anything else), it seems like bad experiment design to not totally control for mic technique by using an IR. If the mic moves between 2 takes, I'm not really giving you a comparison of the guitars' pickups, am I?

Bottom Line

Given that I still had to get my Charvel So-Cal taken to the local shop for a setup (where the Luthier said it definitely had a "weird setup" from the factory), it seems like spending even $1000 dollars on this kind of guitar doesn't guarantee "no issues and perfect playability out of the box." But, after that spending and setup, this guitar has been a workhorse for me that's been available to me when I've wanted to use it to test products for this site (like when I wanted single coils for my review of John Mayer's Archetype plugin).

For students and hobbyists that want a first Floyd-Rose equipped guitar, don't be afraid of grabbing something used and/or with a Floyd Rose Special, especially if you have other guitars. Overall, the Jackson Dinky DK3XR is nicer than I thought it would be when I've played it. But there's also no doubt that it seems demonstrably easier to throw way out of tune than my Floyd Rose 1000-equipped Charvel. If you rely on your guitars as part of a career or business that earns income, then I think it makes sense to jump up to at least that tier to reduce uncertainty when you're in the studio, gigging, etc.

And what about the Harley Benton guitars I mentioned earlier? Don't they break everything I'm saying? Well, not really. While they are probably a great deal for a lot of players (and the Floyd Rose 1000 mitigates the failure mode I observed with cheaper guitars), if you are a pro I don't think you want to find out what kind other compromises they had to make to hit the < $350 price point with a nicer tremolo.

I think it's important to note that I don't think my observations in this article generalize beyond tremolo-equipped guitars. For example, there are plenty of great basses below $300 where "reliability and availability" aren't going to be the tradeoffs you are making versus buying a $1000 bass.

I hope this article is helpful or at least though-provoking if you disagree. Share your thoughts on Bluesky!