clean strat sound

so now that I'm into my strat lately, I've developed a sense of the tone I like. Distortion is bad for my ears, so it's a very clean Fender sound I'm after. After fiddling around with my amp I've settled on the Jazz setting, which emulates an Fender Jazz King amp, and medium reverb. I have the tone somewhat more than half, so around 6 or 7 on the amp, and maybe 7 or 8 on the guitar. I minimize gain and max out the volume on the amp -- that gives the volume I want with the least gain.

This gives me a great clean Fender sound. I use the bridge and middle pickup, and I get a good fender "quack" or "spank" in the tone. Overall I hear it as a sort of 50's tone, before distortion took over -- maybe a Buddy Holly strat sound. I like it -- it has that 50s retro-future feeling in it -- just like the design of the strat has those 50s curves. It's a sound a Gibson can't mimic. My gibby gives me another great tone that the Fender can't do.

Too bad my recording equipment can't do it justice on youtube.

Certainly the amp matter quite a bit. The other settings on my amp can create an entirely different clean tone. I like the jazz clean tone, with more tone than a jazz guitar might use.