Guitar Blog

Teisco guitar

Back in March I mentioned that I'd bought an old Teisco guitar on eBay, then neglected to ever mention it again. Well, the guitar had really great sounding pickups, although perhaps the action was a tad too high for regular playing.


It also had one of the control knobs missing, so I replaced the whole set of four with an appropriately vintage-looking set also found on eBay. One slight annoyance with the appearance was that at some point someone had decided to spray gold glitter all over the whole guitar in an effort to make it look glam (perhaps?). I have been trying to gently scrape this off, but it's everywhere including on the fingerboard.


Nevertheless, the glitter doesn't detract from the great sound. Seeing as the action wasn't appropriate for regular playing, I decided to raise it even further and bought a nut extension from a guy called Chickenbone John who regularly advertises his slide-guitar products on eBay. This nut extension also has the side-effect of increasing the string spacing at the headstock end (obviously!) of the guitar so that the outside strings are almost hanging over the edge of the fingerboard! However, this is not a problem as I am using this guitar for slide playing (got a lovely bottleneck from Chickenbone John too!) and am playing it in the lap position as you would a Hawaiian guitar. The guitar is currently tuned to an open D chord and it sounds wonderful!

For more on Teisco guitars, see: www.teiscotwangers.com