Fender Artist Ritchie Blackmore Stratocaster Olympic White Fender

As music fans, Ritchie Blackmore’s riffs live in our subconscious. Almost every aspiring musician in the western world has tried to scrape out “Smoke On The Water,” to varying degrees of success. So it’s no surprise that Blackmore’s Artist Stratocaster would be so loved by so many. Based on his favorite ’70s Strat, it features a maple “U”-shape neck with 7.25″-radius rosewood fingerboard with graduated scalloping and 21 vintage-style frets. A center “dummy” pickup augments dual Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound Flat SSL-4 single-coil Strat pickups with reverse winding and reverse polarity on the bridge, as well as three-way switching for masterful tone and control.

Founded by Leo Fender in 1938 as Fender’s Radio Service, what is now the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation began making electric guitars and amplifiers in 1945. The rest, as they say, is history. Creator of the world’s first mass-produced, and by far most popular, solid-bodied electric, Fender is now the world’s leading guitar manufacturer.

Developed hand-in-hand with some of the biggest artists of yesterday and today, the Fender Artist Series is a collaborative line of signature models incorporating hand-selected tonewoods and custom appointments and specs, voiced to specific tones and playing styles by our master builders and the artists themselves. Stratocasters, Telecasters, Jaguars, Jazzmasters, and Jazz, Precision, and Jaguar basses take on new life with the help of some of music’s most revered icons.