The headstock still has the often missing Teisco Del Rey badge, and it is equipped with cheap open-gear tuners. There are 20 frets and the fret wire is pretty small. There are cool-looking fret markets on the edges of the fretboard, which are unlike any other guitar I have seen. The 24 ¾-inch scale neck also appears to be made of mahogany (three pieces) and it is capped with a rosewood fretboard. The neck pocket is huge, so much that there is only clear access to the first 14 frets. The silver aluminum pickguard does not go with this color combination very well, but it is original to the guitar. The body appears to be made of mahogany, and it is shot with a subdued tobacco burst finish. This is a small guitar with a short-horned body that is closer to that of a Fender Musicmaster or Mustang than a Stratocaster. It is unmolested and unmodified with the exception of new strings and a fresh set-up. It was sold to Faust Music in Wisconsin, and it was put away in the basement until the store went out of business last year. The guitar we are looking at here today is a ET-220 that was built in the late 1960s.
Since then they have attained a cult-like following, particularly with their Spectrum series instruments. Teisco keyboards were sold until the 1980s. In 1967 Kawai bought the company and discontinued the Teisco name overseas in 1969, and in 1977 for the Japan market. Teisco is an acronym for “Tokyo Elecrric Instrument and Sound Company.” The company was started in 1946 and started to sell instruments under this brand name in 1964. It was my first chance to play one that had not been beaten to death or modified beyond recognition. I love funky old Japanese guitars, and when I had the opportunity to buy a new old stock Teisco Del Rey ET-220 electric I jumped at the chance. If you play with a group, who knows? If you replace the pick-ups you can end up with a great-looking nostalgia axe. If you play solo, it's just about the best you can expect for the price. While this may not sound impressive, the guitar was built in '67 or '68 (Teisco records are now kept almost exclusively by fans, so dates are hard to tell) and has never had anything replaced but the strings - a testament to it's construction. I bought this for bar-gigs, and the sound I got was perfect for the scene, plus, it's strong enough to have been splattered with beer and soco more times than I can count and never miss a beat. Solid-body, light enough to forget you've got it over your shoulder, but it doesn't get away from you either.
Depending on where you strum, it's easy to accidentally switch the pick-ups off on the up-stroke. Also, the bridge has a tricky string-adjustment mechanism that doesn't allow for individualized tweaking, but which does, admittedly, help give the tone a touch of that icy telecaster feel. The wiring in the upper pick-up (both single coil) comes and goes, occasionally leading to general aural nastiness when it cuts off, so I just keep that pick-up off when it's being fidgety. Also, and though this apparently varies greatly from owner to owner, it had, and stil has, some of the fastest action I've ever had the please to play on, and a very smooth fretboard, comparable to the Voodoo Les Pauls.
It is said that you could hammer fenceposts into icy ground with it and it would come out okay - I believe it. On the other hand, everything else about the piece is about as durable as could be hoped for.
This is EXTREMELY common with Teisco, and is one of the reasons they are so obscure. Not even the owner of the store could tell who made this model, as the logo (traditionally made from a steel plate and glued on, I now know) had falen off. I got it packaged with a vintage Vox solid state practice amp for a total of $450, but I believe only about $100 of that was for the guitar. It wasn't exactly what he was looking for, but exactly suited for how I play, so he called me over. A friend of mine found this for me at First Flight in the east village, NYC.