On impulse, I bought this electric guitar on eBay. I found it when I was searching for a Teisco (a Japanese brand popular in the 70s.) Here’s the listing: Teisco style guitar. It’s unlabeled (no brand name on headstock) - I’ve seen a lot of this on old Japanese electric guitars at music shops. I wonder where the guitar originated?
I’m no guitar snob - I like the old, cheap beat up vintage Japanese guitars, and I’m just going to play garage rock with it if I wind up playing with other people. I do plan on replacing the tuners if they turn out to be crap, which is probably pretty likely. Other than that, all I care is that it’s an electric guitar.
Does anyone have any idea what the origin of this guitar is? It’s clearly an “off-brand” (actually, NO-brand) - so where did it come from? Was there some company that mass produced guitars and then left the headstock unbranded, selling them to other companies so they could badge them as their own? I’ve seen Teisco type guitars badged as Kingston, Noble and various other obscure names that are all virtually the same guitar. Is that the case with this one?
No clue - but it looks cool. There are a few private-label factories that just crank out TONS of guitars in the Far East - Samick in Korea, Fuji Gen Gakki in Japan and I am sure a few equivalents in China and Indonesia. What their arrangements are with Teisco and all the other funky-brand guitars (Dillon, Oscar Schmidt, Samick, Jay Turser - you know the usual suspects) are unclear to me.
Have a ton of fun with it and do what you can to make sure it is set up properly before you attempt to wrangle noise out of that beast!
A quick Google search turned up this forum that seems to be all about old Japanese guitars. I didn’t dig around much but you might find something here.
I don’t know what it is either, but I love those old slider switches. They’re so 50’s!
Maybe I’ll put some on my Brian Moore Custom.
Or maybe not.
Hah. High end custom guitars are a truly beautiful thing - but there’s also a lot to be said for quirky, vintage cheapness, especially all the retro Japanese “space-age” stuff from the 70s. Some of the better Teisco models like the Spectrum are actually highly sought after by garage, punk or indie rockers (I think the Smashing Pumpkins guitarist used a Teisco at least for a while.)