Chula Vista

When it comes to large brands like Fender, Squire, Epiphone, Ibanez, etc. your best bet is to choose the model you want and then play as many examples of it as possible. Those guys crank out hundreds of guitars a day and there's going to be some very happy accidents along the way. The right combo of wood weights, alignment, setup, etc.

One of the best strats I ever owned was a $300 Made in Mexico model that I hadn't planned on buying but just happened to pick up and mess around on. That guitar was as good if not better than a lot of much higher priced Made in USA ones I'd played.

That's one advantage of Guitar Center (and they don't have many) is that they'll usually have a couple dozen of any one model for you to try out.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”