Over the years, I’ve owned a number of guitars that either didn’t cost me very much or that many would agree were “cheap”.
My first handful of electric guitars were a 3/4 size Memphis Strat-style, an MIJ Squier E-Series Stratocaster, a Lyon (Washburn’s “cheap” brand) Stratocaster, and a $99 Epiphone Les Paul Special II. Heck, my friends’ first electrics were a MIK Squier II Stratocaster and a Cort Effector of some kind.
With that E-series strat being the outlier, and as much as I think my friends and I all liked playing that MIK Squier II, I was experienced with cheap guitars in the first few years I played guitar.
I hated that guitar and everything about it…the headstock, the “not quite Les Paul” single cutaway, the silver neck pickup, the control plate…I hated that Tele and therefore I hated all Teles. They weren’t a Strat and therefore they were inferior.
For years, that Tele shaped my opinion of all things Tele until I had the opportunity to buy one SUPER cheap. My opinion would forever change and it would become the guitar that has stuck around longest out of any guitar I’ve ever owned.
I never said my opinions were sound, good, or resembled anything close to either of those.
Pawn Shopping
This story is one where you point to your kids and say “Kids, this is how NOT to do things. This is how to be dishonest and swindle a pawn shop”. In my defense, don’t most pawn shops take advantage of and swindle people who are desperate and in need of money? I mean, I’m no “Robin Hood of pawn shops” here, but I was just taking something back for the little guy. Right?
I used to stop at random pawn shops to see what they had. My wife and I called it “pawn shopping”. There was a chain that used to have a very particular pricing system that effectively displayed how much money the shop had invested in an item right on the tag. If you didn’t know the system, you just thought it meant nothing, but I knew someone who used to work there told me the code. I used it to score some killer deals.
Just a Look
My wife and I were coming back from doing something over in Dallas after checking out a bougie grocery store that I’d seen when I worked out that way. I’d spied the pawn shop in question on my way there and pulled in on the way back.
“I’m just going to look,” I told her, stressing the word look. I was not being dishonest…I had no intention of buying anything. We walked inside and on the wall hung a Tele that had seen better days. It was a three color sunburst with a black pickguard. Remember, I was not at all fond of Telecasters, had not given one a single thought, and this one was no different. However, it was the only decent guitar on the wall.
I picked it up and noticed the bridge was odd. I used my phone to Google what it was and learned it was a Fishman VT Powerbridge, which contained a piezo pickup generally used in acoustic instruments. While I had a high level understanding of what it did, it wasn’t of much interest to me.
The guitar had different pickups than most Teles did: a Rio Grande Muy Grande and Halfbreed. I had no idea what that brand meant, but it didn’t have the silver cover on the neck pickup, so that was a win.
I looked at the tag and the pricing scheme told me the pawnshop had $50 invested. They were asking $300, which wasn’t shabby for a Made in Mexico Fender.
The sales rep came over and I asked for a cable to try it out. While I waited, I strummed a few chords. The neck was quite comfortable and was one of the nicer necks I’d played at that point in time.
When the rep arrived with the cable, I plugged the guitar up, turned up the amp a little, and strummed a chord expecting the worst.
Bzzzt-grrrch
It was worse than the worst I’d expected. The guitar didn’t even work. It made this fizzy electronic sound. I recognized it as the sound that active pickups make when the battery they need to power them is dead. I turned the guitar over for the first time and saw a battery compartment.
“Of course the Fishman is active,” I thought to myself. I’d known this but didn’t even think about it. I took the battery out and put it to my tongue. It was dead as a door nail.
A Lie By Omission
I pulled my wallet out and saw $85 in cash from a pedal I’d sold a few days before. They had $50 bucks in so I was hoping they’d take a 70% profit.
I called the sales rep over, explained that the guitar wasn’t working right, plugged it in, and showed them the “bzzzt-grrrch” noise. He made a face. That particular sound isn’t all that pleasant.
The rep went over and asked the manager. The manager came over, I showed them the same noise, and he immediately agreed to $85 out the door. For the price of $75.83 plus tax, I walked out of the pawnshop with a beat up Tele.
Should I have told them about the battery thing? The correct answer is yes, but I didn’t lie…I DID say it wasn’t working right. I just omitted how easy of a fix it would be.
It Worked Out
We got home, a fresh 9v battery went in, and it worked right away. In spite of the numerous chips, scratches, dents, and damage already done to it, the guitar played and sounded great. Normally, Telecasters are on the brighter side, but the Rio Grande pickups really tamed that. I’d eventually pick up an SX Tele copy that had a tortoiseshell pickguard and I’d swap it out with the black one before selling the SX.
Unfortunately, as things sometimes go, money became tight and I ended up selling for the guitar for $450…a tidy profit. A month later, I got a major bonus that would have kept it home. I really missed that guitar. But, life is full of quirky twists and turns.
As luck would have it, a few months down the road, the same guitar come up on Craigslist. I emailed the guy, and it was the same guy I’d sold it to. I immediately offered to buy it back for what he’d paid me for it, he accepted, and the guitar found its way back home.
John Oliviera of Big John’s Guitars is a wizard, and has worked on pretty much every guitar I own or have owned. While he’s out in Denton, TX, the drive is absolutely worth it. Over the years we’ve had a number of conversations and, before either of us know it, our time’s up.
I think the very first work I ever had him do was swap the Rio Grande pickups out of this with the pickups in a ’96 American Telecaster I’d picked up after buying this.I thought if a MIM Fender Tele was good, a USA Tele would be even better. While it sounded better, at least to my ears, it did not play better.
I eventually sold that USA Tele to Guitar Center for my asking price…a rare feat. I saw they eventually sold it for $300 or so more than they gave me and it was gone pretty quick.
Shortly after quickly falling out of love with the USA stock pickups, I reached out to John and began inquired about a pretty significant bit of work. We went back and forth and discussed changing pretty much everything:
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- adding a vaneer and refinish in purple
- installing new pickups and wiring them however he wanted
- a refret with stainless steel frets
- staining the neck a vintage amber
- applying a spaghetti-style waterslide decal
- changing the dot inlays to abelone
- adding new tuners
- adding a vaneer and refinish in purple
Pickups/Electronics
Initially, John suggested a set of GFS Power Rock pickups. They are stacked humbuckers that look like regular telecaster pickups (I’d softened on hating the silver neck pickup) but with increased, noiseless output. He wired them in the following setup on a 5-way switch:
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- 5 – Neck in series
- 4 – Neck in parallel
- 3 – One coil from each pickup in parallel
- 2 – Bridge in parallel
- 1 – Bridge in series
Positions 2 and 4 offer this really mellowed out sound that really pulls back on whatever drive pedal I’m using. I often use it for playing cleaner parts with just a hint of drive. If you mix in a little bit of the Piezo bridge, it adds a layer of sound that the magnetic pickups alone don’t give.
We replaced the volume knob that controlled the magnetic pickups with a concentric knob, which are two knobs in one, so I could have both a tone and volume control. The Piezo bridge knob retained its single knob, and we kept the mini-switch that controlled which pickups were active.
In 2021, and after 13 years, the neck pick up began to lose some of its oompf while the bridge pickup kept trucking along. I bought a Seymour Duncan Antiquity II Mini Humbucker, new pickguard, and John replaced it and wired things back up with the following options:
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- 5 – Antiquity II in series
- 4 – Antiquity II and GFS (full)
- 3 – GFS parallel and Antiquity II
- 2 – GFS in parallel
- 1 – GFS in series
- While I don’t get that 2nd mellow option in the 4th position, I get this really interesting sound in the 3rd position. I haven’t quite fully explored it and how I can use it in recordings, but I really need to dig into it, especially if I dial in the piezo pickup.
The Neck and Tuners
If the neck was comfortable before, John took that comfort to a luxury level. He has a service where he contours the fretboard and I had him make that adjustment to my Tele. In the nearly 13 years since he worked that magic on the neck, it’s been back once for a very minor tweak.
I bought some Wilkinson vintage-style tuners off of the GFS site and installed them myself. I’ve always been fond of the way those looked and thought it classed the neck up a bit.
In April of 2022, it came time to change the strings in preparation of starting recording Volume Four. I swapped out the Wilkinson tuners for a set of Fender Locking Tuners, which are hard to beat those locking tuners and make restringing a breeze.
With the serial number wiped away due to the neck refinish, I had a local shop at a nearby mall engrave it on a new neck plate. It looks terrible. I want to have it redone so the engraving is more cut into the plate. I just need to find a place willing to do that.
Are the Neck and Body Actually USA Made?
I will probably be corrected and I welcome the correction, but after Googling around, in the early ’90s (I think until ’93) the Fender plant in Mexico didn’t have the machining hardware available to make their own necks and bodies yet. American made necks and bodies were shipped down and the guitars were then assembled with the normal hardware and electronics found in the Mexican-made Fender line at the time.
That’s something that’s been debated, disputed, proven, and disproven on forums for years. Even if that isn’t the case, the wood in this guitar has held up quite well in the 30+ years since it’s construction. The electronics, with the exception of that Fishman Piezo bridge, have been completely replaced, the wiring upgraded, and some definite wizardry done to the pickup options I have access to.
The Tele was my go-to guitar to play and travel with for a number of years. I look back on my initial opinion of them and realize just how wrong I was.
I once thought that Stratocasters were the superior guitar. Over the years, I’ve owned too many Strats from every country they’re manufactured in, but I never found that felt as comfortable to play as any Tele I’ve owned. The Strat I own now is a Squier I got for $250 during a Labor Day sale because spending $250 for a guitar to sit on a guitar rack or in a case makes more sense than having one that costs 4x that amount.
It took me one Tele to fall in love with the guitar. One, and it was even close to top of the line. Sure, the wizardry helps, but it was a great guitar when I picked it up off the hanger at that pawn shop so many years ago and continues to be one of my favorite guitars I’ve ever owned.