Jeff Beck never attained the commercial success of the guitarists who preceded him and followed him in the Yardbirds – Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, respectively – but among rock’n’roll guitarists, Beck is as revered and influencial as his fellow Yardbirds alumni.

Fender had wooed Beck in the late 1980s, but Beck demurred, and the model originally developed for him was introduced in 1987 as the Strat Plus.

It featured the quiet Lace Sensor pickups, as did the Clapton model that followed it a year later, and as did the Jeff Beck Stratocaster when it finally debuted in 1991.

Like Clapton, Beck had started out with Fenders but developed his signature sound on a humbucker-equipped Gibson. Appropriately, his Fender model featured two adjacent single-coil pickups – in essence a humbucker – in the bridge position. This “fat-Strat” configuration was perfect for the thick, distorted tone that Beck was known for, and by the end of the decade, the HSS (humbucker-single-single) had become an established option in the Strat lineup.