Schecter Dream Machine
Throughout Mark's career, he's become synonymous with the Stratocaster and that unmistakable tone across many of his hits make you instantly think "Strat" when you hear them.
But it was really only the first couple of albums that Mark used Stratocasters made by Fender.
To cash in on the Stratocaster's success across the years, many guitar manufacturers produced their own Stratocaster shaped guitars, although few are as close as Schecters of the 80's!
Mark moved over to Schecters in the early 80s, using a Candy Apple with dotless maple fretboard as his main guitar throughout the Love over Gold and Brothers in Arms era, and later bringing it out for those moments where only a Strat will do on the likes of On Every Street, and it Local Hero only ever gets played on it.
At first glance, you'd swear it was a Stratocaster, until you look closer at the controls to see only a volume control and a tone control in silver, and instead of a 5 way pick up selector switch, 3 three way toggle switches, which either turn each pickup on or off, or into a hotter mode, allowing for a little more variation in pick up combinations.
The pick ups, originally, were custom Schecter F500ts, which he later replaced with Duncan Alnicos.
Mark had a couple of these - the Candy Apple with the black F500t's, pictured, the workhorse Candy Apple with the Duncans, a Sunburst Strat which is pretty much exclusively for Tunnel of Love, and the Walk of Life Telecaster is also made by Schecter.
Mark didn't go back to playing Fenders in his shows until much later in his solo career - and it's been suggested that he does so because he can afford to transport them, suggesting that he's playing the original 60's models.
We haven't seen the Schecter brought out for a performance in years, although it probably wasn't surprising that it wasn't put into the recent Christies auction, although it was a surprise that the MK1 and the Telecaster were.
To continue to bring you as accurate a show as possible, for our Alchemy tour, Dave has fitted a replica of the F550t Schecter pick board for the upcoming tour.
Although these were replaced with Duncans for its wider use, the sound of the F500t replicas are beautiful and Dave does not want to change them!!!
