1960s Teisco Spectrum 2 Electric Guitar

It's a cool green Tesico! Japan! That classic "oinky" sound! And... wild looks. We all love them -- but we love the ones with the slab rosewood board and Gibson 24 3/4" scale length best, don't we? This one has those. I find the earlier 21-23" scale guitars pretty squeezed for my hands.

This guitar came in for some quick work that was "done while you wait." I replaced the original bridge with a Tune-O-Matic type, cut an old knife into a new whammy handle, shielded all the electronics, cleaned it up, and gave it a thorough setup. It handles just as well as any American-made guitar, now, and has a nice warbly "Bigsby" feel on the bar.

I'm not huge on the back-painted pickguard but it does stand-out, doesn't it?

The faux-rosewood headstock face is pretty stylish, too, and I can never argue with the Teisco badge or one-piece string tree. The zero-fret had to be slotted like a regular nut, unfortunately, due to the 60s/70s tendency to make the zero frets taller than the rest of the frets.

Most of these old Japanese guitars have a laminated-rosewood board but the nicer ones (like this guy) have "real" rosewood boards. Thankee, Gods!

The switches aren't just on-offs... they're some sort of weird treble cut/off circuit. The pups are also humbuckers rather than the usual Teisco single coil madness.

Rather than install big old studs, I installed the adjustable threaded posts directly into the mahogany body of the guitar and tapped the holes. This actually made for even more secure footing and saved me some trouble on the install. The original bridge was just garbage, unfortunately.

Not the best whammy and not the worst, by far. It works fine as long as you don't torture it with huge pitch-shifts.