MAKO Tele Traditional

i found this in a local hock shop, made in nippon, about early 80's it think, just picked it up and one look sold me. it only had 5 strings, but the neck!! is a beautiful, absolutely straight and flat birds-eye maple that warmoth would be charging $300.00 for! spent $100.00 and walked out with it in an old ibanez gig bag. finish is butterscotch, very thin high-gloss with black pickguard. grover tuners, the neck is a dream to play, although i wish it were satin-finish. typical tele features, less is more, but after adjusting everything, adding new pots, and medium earnie ball slinky's, i was amazed at what i had bought! this guitar looks like it had been lovingly cared for for many years, and then given to a 14-year-old! the pickguard and control plate were all marked up, and somebody had substituted an amplifier knob for the tone control. i like the different feel, so left it like that, but put a tortoise-shell pickguard on it for looks. set up and cleaned up, this thing looks six months old! i bought this to put a pair of kent armstrong p-90s in that i got years ago, but after playing it, i think i'll look around for an sg or les paul copy to use those with. there is certainly nothing wrong with the sound or playability of this beast! for about $140,00 i now have a tele that looks, sounds, and plays like something from the fender custom shop! i'm keepin' it!

i play a little bit of bob seger, jackson browne some blues, this fits right in with all that just right. neck pickup was set up way too low, bridge way too high on the treble side, making high-gain solos dangerous to your hearing. a setup changed all that for the better. i've had a fair share of big amps in my time, am now over 70 years old and have gotten to the point where i play purely for the joy in it. i'm one of those guys who found a beheringer gm-110 amp at a closeout price, and snapped it up after reading reviews right here. a 30 watt celestion tube-tone speaker cleared up the "beher-fart" problem the original speaker had, and i use an echo-delay pedal in the effects loop and a vt-999 behr od pedal in front, both because of the high-quality noise gate, and because it gives me a kick-down, tube-sweet overdrive second channel and it sure makes a nice pre-amp, with the tone stack. . this guitar is great through this setup! the neck can do any sound you ever heard out of a tele, and the bridge....i'm really starting to love the dial-in twang the guitar's controls give me. middle position is a perfect blend of neck and bridge..i don't know what more you could ask, really, from such a deceptively simple rig! this occupies a very nice niche all it's own!

three piece alder body, one piece birds-eye maple neck with skunk-stripe, good tuners, hardly any fret wear, one or two small nicks in the body, and with the tortoise-shell guard, it looks like a million bucks. the action was about 3/8 inch at the 12th fret, intonation was risable, bridge was set up flat; but the guitar was playable, even like that! the larger, non-fender headstock just adds to the looks of it, in my opinion. grain is very well matched in the body,(you really have to look closely to find the glue-lines,) and everything on the guitar except for the worn-out pots is excellent quality, and i should be able to leave this thing to somebody in my will. i've been playing off and on for about 40 years (bought a strat-copy when i got back from vietnam) and have played lots of guitars priced anywhere in the range over time. my all-time favorite hard rocker was a black neck-through daion (looked like a prs) that was ripped-off in the 80's, but for just sheer joy of making music, you will go very far before you find anything more sweet and playable than this $100.00 mako tele. after setting it up, i immediately spent over $100.00 for a hard-shell case. one of the best music investments i've ever made. maybe there's a small tube amp in my future...

if i were still doing it, i would gig with this in a hot minute. this thing is very, very, well-made, sometime in the mid 80's, i think. top quality hardware and workmanship, the neck joint won't allow a feeler guage in it. i have no brand-snobbery; i will use any tool that works to get the job done; but, hey, you can feel quality when you pick it up. when i got this, i think everything on it was stock except for the amplifier knob on the tone pot. i think it would be absolutely dependable on stage, and if you can manage to look like keith richards, well, with this you can sound just like him, too.

with something like this, who do you talk to? i drive a 30-year-old mercedes (bought for $300 with a bad water pump) that i would take to the east coast anytime, and to me, you just can't find quality like this easily anymore. warranty? what are those really worth? make your buying decision based on your gut feeling about the thing, and do whatever is needed to get where you want to go with it. if you haven't learned to tinker with your instruments to get what you want, you aren't a guitar player yet.

i began to learn to play about 40 years ago, (someday i might call myself a guitar player) and off and on have always had a couple of guitars around. right now the stable includes an ibanez artwood with a k&k pickup (excellent, by the way) and an older epiphone acoustic that loves to eat 9-volt batts, but sounds best with fender bullets on it plugged-in. i just gave a strat copy with fender noiseless pu's away to a friend who had his middle 70's les paul ripped-off. santa fe is risky territory, lost of burglaries here-about. what i like most about this guitar is the purity of it, the tone and playability, the feel of the solid quality of the instrument. doesn't matter where it came from, the proof is in the playing. now, if this were a 12-string........