A Cheap, but Awesome Telecaster Copy with Special Talents
I wanted a Telecaster again. I had very little money to spend and I wanted it to my own exact specifications. It turned out to be an absolute winner! (video inside)
I Got my Cake and I Get to Eat it too!
I’ve been told in the past that I have a champagne taste but a beer budget. In more recent years the budget has not improved, but my standards have certainly dropped!
However that doesn’t mean my quality expectations have dropped, more like I am more understanding of the fact that good quality is available without breaking the bank and also that a guitar with bespoke appointments is only few small challenges away if you’re into getting your hands dirty and don’t mind hacking at your guitar.
That’s when the greatness of a cheap guitar is realized. It allows you to make changes that would be foolish to try on a premium-priced instrument and it makes you feel like the head of your own custom shop!
I bought a really cheap Telecaster copy and I made some modifications to it, simple ones that have transformed it into something that is not readily available in any kind of affordable format off the shelf.
It combines a few ideas that are already well-known: A hidden neck pickup, resulting in the appearance of this guitar having just a single bridge pickup (a.k.a an Esquire) and a piezo, under-saddle pickup/saddle unit to help create acoustic guitar tones.
The piezo pickup assembly is made by Brenner Guitar Products in the USA. It’s very good, but has some limitation depending on how your guitar is constructed (detailed in the video).
As a faux acoustic guitar recorded through an Impulse Response, it sounds better than I expected it would and I was expecting it to sound pretty good. Personally I think, in a mix, it sounds just like an acoustic guitar. One caveat is that as an acoustic guitarist I’m only really a strummer, so I’m probably not as fussy about the tone as a real acoustic guitarist.
So it looks like an Esquier, all black in keeping with the “Stealth” label, it behaves like a standard Telecaster and has an added trick up it’s sleeve by being able to mimick an acoustic guitar pretty convincingly.
The plan now is to see if I can get some gigs where I can play the role of electric and acoustic guitarist with the same guitar. I also have another idea of how I could expand on that too and cover the roles of three instruments whilst only having to carry one guitar case with me to a gig. That’s for another time.
UPDATE: Mark at Brenner USA has updated the Piezo-One product by including extended intonation “Top-Load” nuts with the P1-2 saddles. This provides a much-improved performance when fitting the unit to a top-loading bridge.
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