FROM NOW ON, unless a new Fender has 'Made In USA' written somewhere about its person, it comes from Japan. End of an era, I hear the sentimentalists muttering, but they can sod off.

Apart from the fact that this guitar plays as well as any recent American Fender, the detailed design work that has gone into the Contemporary Stratocaster Deluxe singles it out as an instrument worthy of our rapt attention. And it's the only guitar I've ever seen with an instruction manual.

So what's new? The black-finished headstock is smaller, back to the size it was in the early fifties. String guides are angled posts, rather than the wiry pylons on older guitars, and the truss rod is now concealed beneath the extravagance of the new string locking machinery.

This highly functional device clamps the strings from the side, and is tightened with an ungainly but effective 1½in lever protruding from the lower side of the locking unit (aka cam arm). The fast release action does away with the need for tools when retuning, and also makes restringing a quicker process.

String heights at this end of the neck are governed not by grooves in the nut (there aren't any), but by raising or lowering the stainless (Fender prefer it to brass) steel with two small Allen keys. Simple but clever, like all the best ideas.

The neck has one more fret than usual, located at the top of the neck (perhaps they should have put it between the 12th and 13th?) on a promontory of rosewood overhanging the end of the neck. The 22 frets are fatter than normal, and the rosewood feels more highly polished. The back of the neck is traditional maple-with-walnut-strip, finished in a decidedly untraditional semi-matt varnish, all silky smooth and sensuous to the touch — new and yummy.

Four bolts retain the neck to a standard Stratocaster body, done up in Emerald Mist, a pearly metalflake green. The scratchplate is non-laminated black placcy, which is rather roughly edged. On it sit yer ordinary Strat single coil pickups in the neck and middle positions, backed up by a large and box-like Fender humbucker beside the bridge. Controls for these are the regular five-way selector, a coil-tap for the box, and two big new plastic knobs with the backwards 'F' logo on their tops. These reside in the old volume and second tone control positions and provide, yes, volume and overall tone.

Then there's the bridge. Fender's new System Three tremolo bridge/tailpiece is a remarkably complicated piece of engineering, which fortunately offers facilities to match. As for its construction: in the true spirit of investigative journalism, I tipped up the bridge and peered into the guitar, to be met with a glimpse of something that looked like the Forth Bridge (on a bad day). Suffice to say it works, and better than any Kahlers I have come across recently.

The strings no longer pass through the body, but make a zigzag progress from the fine tuners over and under tensioning blocks, to the fixed semi-circular bridge saddle wheels. This setup means the strings exert sufficient downward pressure on the bridge to give maximum sustain.

The fine tuners are really that. Though they are small and fiddly to use, Fender have made an effort not to obstruct the player's right hand — the knobs do not move up or down when adjusting.

It gets more complicated. The tremolo arm which snaps in/out, is a Swiss Army knife in disguise. Swing it past the tone control and it locks the bridge in position. Snap it out, and there's a 2.5mm Allen key for setting intonation and bridge height on the end. Unscrew the bulbous knob, and there's a 1.5mm Allen key inside for saddle and nut height adjustments. Screw the bulbous end back on, and use it for taking stones out of your Doc Martens.

One last thing: Fender claim to have got round the problems of tuning guitars with floppy tremolos. What you do is lock the bridge before you tune. This allows you to set up intonation and tuning without the bridge tipping up in sympathy. Once you're satisfied, unlock the bridge, and watch it move, thus making all your careful fiddlings as naught. Fear not, but remove the wang bar, and turn the guitar on its head. Next to the strap button is an Allen key socket. Insert the 2.5mm end therein, and wind.

Now watch the bridge sit up/lie down, depending on which way you wind, thus putting the strings back in tune (or making them snap one by one if you go too far).

The Contemporary Deluxe feels slightly larger than ordinary Strats. Getting used to the enormity of the bridge is the only problem about this, and a minor one at that. And for the most part, this guitar sounds like a Strat. Piano tones from the neck pickup, picky out of phase front position, bright and clear middle pickup, and then this bloody great humbucker. Obviously it gives more poke and volume to the treble but it drains the bridge position of brightness, even when one of the coils is tapped. This in itself isn't a problem (you wouldn't buy the guitar if you didn't want a humbucker), but it does adversely affect the second out-of-phase setting. Swings and roundabouts here, I suppose.

As a tone control, Fender's new TBX system works. As a means of cutting or boosting treble without resort to active circuitry, it's a useless innovation — but the only such one on the guitar.

This is an intelligent instrument, which will repay your attention. While little has been done to alter the basic properties of its Stratocasterness (the humbucker), lots of cleverness has gone into making it an easier guitar to use. It would be a shame if the innovations on this guitar deterred anyone from trying it out, as it would be easy to underestimate its user-friendliness. Complicated but worthwhile.

FENDER Strat deluxe: £634

CONTACT: Fender UK c/o Arbiter, (Contact Details)