I must have been a guy in my most recent past life, because I spend far too much time obsessing over things to which most women wouldn’t give a second thought.
Like guitars.
As I’ve mentioned, I have several. Now I keep thinking that when/if my inheritance from my mother comes through, I would surely love me a seafoam-colored Telecaster to add to that collection. (I love their distinctive twang.) I probably would love one, but I do not love the price tag. So I’ve been trolling the intertubes to find a well-regarded knockoff. I think I’ve found one in the Xaviere XV-610, made by and sold at the aptly-named guitarfetish.com and selling for less than $200. I tell myself my mom would want me to have it. I am probably lying to myself.
But then this itch will be scratched, at least for a while.
I bet dipinto right here in town has something that would play nic eand look like that too…
Nah, I check with them all the time. The used stuff is priced high (the last Tele I saw was $1200) and disappears quickly and their own stuff, while really cool, is still a little out of my price range. But the DiPinto Belvedere will probably be my next obsession.
I was the same way for a while wanting a blue-sparkle Mosrite Ventures guitar. I ended up getting an Eastwood Sidejack. (As Mosrites are now in the $2k and up price range)
The Xaviere guitars I’ve seen have been pretty decent. The pickups are mediocre, of course, but at that price, you’ve got to expect it. But I suspect that with a $100 set of pickups, they’d sound pretty good.
As a woman who loves her guitars, too–among them my early-90s Fender Custom Shop (Japan) Telecaster Jerry Donahue model, fire-engine red finish–I’m not sure you’d get the Tele-twang you want out of this one. The humbuckers would, I think, make it sound more Les Paul-like. Other than that, though, it IS cute! 🙂
You mean your wife let you get another one? LOL
Anna is correct, find another replica but without the humbuckers. You will not get the same twang with the double magnet pickups.
So what, specifically, do I look for in pickups?
Single coil pickups generally have only one row of magnets, or a skinny cover over it. On a Tele it’s both. The neck pickup looks like a solid metal bar and the bridge pickup is slanted and has six exposed magnets. A standard made in Mexico Tele should run a few hundred at Guitar Center.
Non-humbuckers are narrow. Humbuckers have two pickups in pairs so appear to be wider. The two pickups are wound opposite to cancel out ambient electro magnetic noise. Mostly to kill 60hz fluro light noise. Same principal as the twisting of wires in twisted pair ethernet cables. Opposing windings or the twist effectively cancel out unwanted external noise. The doubling of the opposite wound pickups have the side effect of killing some of the high frequency content of the signal you want to pick up. So you lose the twang, which is not necessarily recoverable by boosting the treble at the amp side. Tele’s and Strats have single pickups, which I think you’d recognize as being narrow long shapes, compared to say a typical LP or with Fenders the Jag and Jazzmaster.
Pickups are about 75% of the sound of an electric guitar. They’re very labor intensive, even with automation, because they’re big coils of wire wrapped around metallic polepieces or bars a few thousand times. They’re also one of the first places that manufacturers skimp, since even wholesale good ones can run $20-30 each (retail, it goes as high as you want– there are boutique hand-wound ones which replicate ones on particular instruments– like, say, the bridge pickup of Eric Clapton’s psychedelic SG from Cream or the overwound Strat pickups that Stevie Ray had– that can run a couple hundred bucks each). Obviously, if the guitar is really, really bad (like the first electric I had, made of pressed cardboard in S. Korea back when it was a third world country), new pickups aren’t going to help it, but if it’s a decent hunk of wood (and even the Chinese-made ones, like the Xaviere, are way better than budget instruments were even 15 years ago), it can improve things tremendously. (If you’re looking for cheap electrics of the Gibson variety, I highly recommend the “Agile” ones at Rondo Music, which are made at the Korean factory that Epiphone used before they got obsessed with profit and moved to China. I can’t speak to their Telecaster clones, but they’ve got to be better than the Indonesian Fender ones. Incidentally, the Mexican Fenders are quite good, if you can find the color you want, and are pretty cheap.)
Yes. The wife let me buy some more. It helps that both the kids *love* them.