Over the past few issues we’ve been looking at and listening to pickups from serious heavyweights: Fender, Gibson, EMG and Bare Knuckle. Dave Burrluck fancies a change…
I’ve never owned a proper Gretsch guitar, but I’ve certainly played, tested, fixed, modded and gigged a few of them over the years. Like many I’m sure, I’ve sometimes been befuddled by the occasionally out-there circuitry, not to mention the ‘creaky ship’ build of many vintage originals. But they’re damn coollooking, aren’t they? And there’s nothing that quite sounds like a Filter’Tron.
The experience of playing a Custom Shop Fender La Cabronita Tele a few years back still sticks vividly in my memory. A simple Tele that sounded like a Gretsch with a roots-rock vibe and an easy drive. Now we’re talking! Today, that now so-called ‘Cabronita style’, a masterstroke of the Custom Shop’s Mike Eldred, is commonplace, though not exactly mainstream. For example, Fender doesn’t make one and the current Squier version is a bit of an offshoot. That said, we did notice the Fender Custom Shop has just started a run of La Cabronita 2.0s. Dream on.
But when Shergold sent in a pair of its new Telstar models (as reviewed in this issue on page 18), that Cabronita longing returned. This model sports a pair of
Filter’Tron look-alikes, as our review reveals, but the Page FilterSonics sound more like mini ‐humbuckers. Still, at just £379, it’s hard to feel short-changed and I couldn’t help wondering where I could take one of these affordable guitars.
Do Your Prep
The two samples of the Telstar we received for evaluation have clearly gone through a basic setup on top of their pretty competent manufacturing. You get a sense of that from the very tidy machining of the body. For example, those open routs for the pickups are very clean, as is the neck pocket (with the neck removed); there’s no finish, just bare wood. The raised centre might be seen as a designer’s whimsy, but it certainly adds another level of detail that needs to be carefully sanded and finished. It’s not quite perfect, but it really is very neatly done.
The frets fall into the wide ’n’ low category, which means anything more than the lightest of levelling, if necessary, isn’t going to help anything. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back to the setup and, oddly, both guitars’ bridges are set with a pretty flat saddle radius. On the original spec, the ’board radius is stated at 406mm (16 inches), pretty similar to the light curve on those saddles. All good, except the actual ’board radius is 305mm (12 inches) (pic 1). The saddle height screws protrude above the saddles, so adding a veneer shim (pic 2) then resetting those saddles and the string height – after tightening the truss rods to g
