Although Kurt was seen playing a variety of Fender guitars over the years, his Fender Jaguar® and Mustang® remain the most iconic due to their use on the "Nevermind" tour and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" music video. Kurt designed the Jag-Stang® to combine his favorite elements of both instruments and brought it to life with help from the Fender Custom Shop in 1993.

Jimi Hendrix took the world by storm with his incredible Monterey Pop Festival performance, which he concluded with the sacrificial burning of his now-iconic hand-painted Stratocaster. Destroyed during the fiery culmination of his set, this one-of-a-kind guitar survived only in photos and film.

‘The Black Strat’ was integral to the recording of Pink Floyd’s seminal masterpiece The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973), as well as follow-up albums Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979), LPs which form the four cornerstones of the classic-era Pink Floyd.

Designed by Dutch co-operative The Fool. Guitar was also owned at various times by Geo. Harrison, Jackie Lomax and Todd Rundgren.

Paul McCartney has played his Höfner violin bass since 1961 when he purchased it whilst playing, with The Beatles, at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg, Germany. He is still playing a violin bass, a 1963 model that he has owned from new, and used on more recordings and played at more gigs than can be counted.

This Fender Stratocaster was used by Stevie Ray Vaughan for much of his career. Dubbed "Number One" and "First Wife" by Stevie, the guitar was used on all of Double Trouble's studio albums. Stevie Ray acquired the guitar from the owner of an Austin, Texas music shop in 1973. The guitar was "rebuilt more times than a custom Chevy," according to a 1983 Dallas Morning News article written about Stevie as he was breaking onto the national music scene. At the time of his death in 1990, Stevie was working with Fender Musical Instruments to create a reproduction "signature model" of Number One. The reproduction became commercially available in 1992.

Sometime between the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions and the June 25 live global telecast of “All You Need is Love,” Harrison’s beloved Stratocaster morphed into what the world now knows as “Rocky.” In a fit of inspiration, he grabbed a brush and some Day-Glo paint to give the instrument a multicolored psychedelic makeover. Instead of the iconic Sonic Blue finish, its top and headstock were now adorned with bright red, green, yellow and orange accents, making it truly stand out on stage. Harrison even painted “Bebopalula” on the upper body, “Go Cat Go” on the pickguard and Rocky on the headstock in December of 1969.

“The polka dots are because that’s the style of my mother, Isabell Guy,” Buddy told me in an unpublished excerpt for an interview in 2015.
 “There’s a long story behind that,” he says. “I promised her that I was going to buy her a polka dot Cadillac to make her feel better, because she had had a stroke and she never saw me play, so I always felt I was lying to her about being a musician! I was going to get famous and drive back to Louisiana in a polka dot Cadillac to show her I’d made it.”


Aptly nicknamed “Frankenstein,” this guitar was pieced together by Eddie Van Halen from modified factory seconds and mismatched odd-lot parts, then spray-painted. It represents an effort to combine some of the most desirable elements of Gibson and Fender guitars into a single instrument that was not commercially available at the time. Van Halen was continually striving to achieve the ultimate guitar for tone, playability, dependability, and functionality. The unique guitar embodies not only his groundbreaking and unorthodox playing style but also his ingenuity in design and engineering. One of the most recognizable guitars of all time, it spawned legions of copies from other manufacturers and inspired generations of fans to design their own instruments.

When Jimmy Page formed Led Zeppelin in 1968, the Dragon Telecaster became Page’s go-to instrument and he played it onstage and in the studio until 1969, wrote Brad Tolinski in Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page. The instrument was the main guitar used on Led Zeppelin and was later used to record the iconic solo for “Stairway to Heaven."

Terry Kath's main guitar - the one with which he is most identified, and which accompanied him on the journey to cult status - is a most unusual 1966 Telecaster, completely customized and plastered with stickers. Kath was so attached to the guitar that he'd buy a seat just for the instrument when traveling by air, rather than entrusting it to airline baggage handlers or even Chicago's road crew. The Tele® was an amalgamation of highly personalized modifications, including a sawed-off Tele bridge with a synchronized Strat® tremolo, a humbucking neck pickup, custom body routes, a reverse control plate, custom tuning machines and three "wing" string trees. Adorned with Pignose stickers and other intricately placed regalia, the guitar has become legendary in of itself and is synonymous with Kath and his enduring musical legacy.

Not a Strat but self built from different parts.