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BASIC & BOMBASTIC ... Fender Tom Delonge Stratocaster

Please see our current Delonge's for sale!

fender tom delonge stratocaster grafitti yellow strat blink 182

Basic Is Beautiful!

black on black fender tom delonge

Simple is better. Less is more. Those are the ideas behind the Fender Tom Delonge Stratocaster. As lead singer and guitarist for the pop/punk band, Blink 182, Delonge didn't need a huge range of guitar tones. He pretty much needed two: huge and ridiculously distorted and a clean sound for a verse here and there. His signature guitar is your basic Strat body and incorporates a Seymour Duncan Invader humbucker pickup in the bridge. One knob for volume control. That's it.

fender tom delonge surf green strat 

Yea, it sounds pretty boring. So why has the guitar been such a huge favorite? Well, for starters, it's a rare hardtail strat so it's been very popular with players who like Strats, but don't want a tremolo. It's routed for 3 pickups (HSS configuration) so modders like it as a project guitar because you can add pickups without needing to do any routing.

 fender tom delonge daphne blue

The Delonge's pickup, the Seymour Duncan Invader, is great for face-melting, ear-destroying distortion. It's a high-output machine with a ton of thickness--forget the standard jangly Strat sound. It's just not what this baby was made to do. It's all about turning the amp to 10 (or 11) and slogging through power chord after power chord. When you need to clean it up a bit, you can back down the volume on the guitar, but even then it won't give you your greatest clean sound. It's a great pickup for a rhythm guitarist, especially if he or she is the only guitar player in the band. (all the Tom's pictured here are ones we sold in the past.)

delonge black with gt striptfender tom delonge pink guitargrafitti yellow tom delonge fender delonge skull crossbones

Plugged into a Marshall or old Fender tube amp, it's guaranteed to take up lots of space in the mix. Undoubtedly that's exactly what Delonge was looking for, and the Invader delivers. Due to the single pickup and single volume control, in some ways the guitar is a "one trick pony." I guess the reason it's been such a popular guitar is it does that one trick so well. And lots of players don't need more tonal variation than one heavy sound anyway. The Delonge Strat is a great guitar and I sell them because, even 20 years after they were first produced, they’re still in great demand (see what we have in stock). Below is a white Squire Delonge I reliced a while back, along with some others.

fender squier delonge relic

fender tom delonge stratocaster grafitti yellow

white squier delonge


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4 comments

  • Volume stuck on 10? Perfect for this guitar!

    • Moderator
  • On my Delonge style strat, I have my push pot coil split doing tone, no volume control, so its stuck on 10 basically. I like it this way.

    • Angry Possum
  • Kenny they go for 700-1,000 for a prefect one. I would say yours is obviously the 1,000 being the paperwork is there! I have a daphne blue one with case and paperwork and i paid 850 and that was a good deal! To be honest i would be very interested in your yellow one!

    • Dylan
  • How much would a yellow virgin go for? I bought new and its still in mint condition never even been set up lives its life in its original case with all paperwork.

    • Kenny