“Fender's overall string spacing is wider than Gibson's, but at the same time Gibson's necks are wider than Fender's. It's absolute madness”: Why Allan Holdsworth ditched Strats for Charvels

Though he never saw great commercial success in his lifetime, Allan Holdsworth's one-of-a-kind approach to the electric guitar earned him the admiration of some of the most decorated players of all time (Frank Zappa once said that Holdsworth “single-handedly reinvented the electric guitar,” while Eddie Van Halen called him “the best, in my book.”)

With a mind-boggling command of the fretboard – and larger hands that allowed for famously large finger stretches – Holdsworth traversed jazz, fusion, funk, and blues with ease, exploring new sounds and approaches to the guitar all the way.

It's unsurprising, then, that Holdsworth was similarly restless when it came to gear, moving first from SGs to Stratocasters. It wasn't long, though, until the guitarist began to chafe at what he saw as the latter's limitations.

During a meeting with Charvel's head honcho at the time, Grover Jackson, Holdsworth laid out his ideal Strat-style guitar, and found the luthier to be more receptive than other makers to his ideas.

“We [Holdsworth and Jackson] went out for a few beers and he was willing to listen to ideas I had about certain woods, whereas a lot of other people wouldn't,” the guitarist told GP in a 1982 interview. “They'd say ‘you can't make a guitar from this wood or that wood.’ But Grover listened to everything, and made three Strat-style guitars from various woods. Also I had the necks made wider at the fingerboard end. I hate the Fender string spacing.”

Asked why by GP, the virtuoso explained, “Fender's overall string spacing is wider than Gibson's, but at the same time Gibson's necks are wider than Fender's. It's absolute madness.

“I had Grover make the necks wide at the top [near the headstock] like Gibsons, and about 2 1/4" wide at the body end of the neck. So that means there's a good 1/8" on either side of the outer strings, which is really nice. The strings used to really fly off the edges of the Stratocasters. I'm really happy with the guitars Grover made. They're the best guitars I've ever owned.”

Just a few short years after this chat with GP, Holdsworth would take his guitar boundary-pushing to a whole new level with the SynthAxe, which he first used on his 1986 album, Atavachron. As he explained in an interview with Guitar World conducted shortly before his passing in 2017, Holdsworth's moves between genres (and gear) often confounded much of his audience.

“People used to write notes on my amp, asking me to stop playing the SynthAxe and play the guitar instead,” he said. “But now people often ask me, ‘We’d love to hear you play the SynthAxe – did you bring it?’”