A few months ago my Mrs watched The Runaways and decided she wanted to maybe have a go at playing guitar, so I started teaching her the basics. She's been borrowing my old Bronze series Warlock to practice on.
A couple of weeks ago I walked into the living room to find her watching my "It Might Get Loud" DVD, and that was it. She became obsessed after hearing the kinds of tones that Jack White was getting out of his old rustic guitars, and so I got her listening to some old blues.
We decided that it was time for her to get her first guitar, so I told my mate who works in a music shop the kind of sound and feel we were going for. He had a think about it and we went in today to see what he had picked out for us in our price range. We tried out a second hand LTD Xtone, but that was a bit muddy. Tried a Squier Tele, another Squier that looked like a Mustang but can't remember the name of it now, an Ibanez AF75, and loads of other stuff in that kind of £300 - £320 range. Then I saw this Fender Mexican Tele in Copperburst, it had been reduced to £365 from just over the £400 mark because people weren't buying that colour, and I could see why because from one angle it just looked like a brown burst.
I didn't want to like it, I didn't want my girl to like it. It was more than we wanted to pay (we are going halves because we are skint as it is...) and I've never been a fan of the Tele shape, for much the same reasons as Roo :P
I plugged it in....
HOLY $*!7!!!
WHAT a sound! For that price, nothing in the shop could touch it! I sat there and twanged out a few notes before looking up to see her reaction, and the look she had on her face, I just KNEW that this was her guitar. She just had this look of pure joy and, to be honest, I was falling hard and fast in love with this thing. it was ugly as sin when I first looked at it but, christ on a bike, it sings like an angel and wails like a fallen banshee when you need it to.
Strumming it normally it played like a dream, but when I went a bit harder on the strings it just came out with this earthy, woody growl that I really wasn't expecting and it hit me somewhere in the centre of my heart.
We put a deposit down and will pick it up next week after our holiday in Cornwall, but my Mrs is so made up and excited about it, it's hard not to go and put the rest on my credit card right now.
This is what we went for:
http://www.gak.co.uk/en/fender-fsr-telecaster-copperburst-black-plate/56428Even now, the more I look at the pics, the more I think that actually it's a bloody beautiful thing.
We were only going through a Fender Mustang II in the shop, so I can't wait to go over to one of my mates houses and put it through something with valves. ^_^
