Silvertone Teisco-Style Fretless

Essentially, this is your run of the mill flea market guitar. 3/4 scale, 2 single coil pickups, one tone, one volume, a big white plastic switch to turn each pickup on and off that ends up not working by the time you own the guitar, body and neck of indeterminate wood. Tobacco sunburst, very vaguely strat shaped. Really cheap tremolo that really nothing more than a bridge balancing against a spring like those horses or turtles they have for really little kids to ride at the park. Improved features include: A) removal of neck pickup for use in another project that as yet has not gotten off the ground. Hole where thepickup used to be has not been filled or covered. B) Non-stock nut from a Hondo II acoustic guitar, the size differntial of which cause only 4 strings to pit across the neck. C) Removal of all frets, facilitated with the can opener from a Swiss Army Knife. Total modification time unknown, but not more than one hour. All rating will be made on the modified version of the guitar, subtract an average of three points to get the review of the original configuration

What was an uninspiring junk/punk/noise guitar has become an entirely new and wonderful instrument with a minimum of effort. I've got some sort of weird mutant hybrid elctric sitar/saz/retard banjo going now, and it really sounds unreal. I play it through the trusty Musicman rp65, with just enough gain to start it overdriving, and honestly, that's all I need. I've used an MXR distortion+ and played around with the blue box and big muff, but they're not needed. The lack of frets completely takes away what little sustain this guitar ever had, and adds all this buzz that sounds just like a resonating bridge. The fact that I only have a neck pickup, and not a very good one, keeps the tone really thin and low-end free, and I've strung it with the lightest guage strings i couldfind. The brindge is set as low as it will go, and i tune it open, fairly low pitched, so there's no much string tension to speack of at all, which also adds to the bouzouki type of on-the-verge-of-being-out-of-tune-all-the-time sound. Fingerpick it slowly and it's a sitar, only 50 times easier to play than the real thing (bends are kind of hard with no fret to work againstm, but you can fret up and down for your microtones) Strum lightly and play melodies on either the highest or the lowest string, and it's a saz, and fret chords up high on the neck and fingerpick as fast, but not necessarily as well, as you can, and it' this crazy frantic demented banjo. And the bonus? With nothing replacing the missing pickup, I have a sound hole, so the thing is semi-acoustic now. Granted, it's not super loud, but you can play alone in your room and hear yourself fine (same weird thin saz tone), or with anyone else who may have built a similar monster. The only thing that sucks about it now it is the tremolo. I had originally taken the frets out hoping to be able to get all sort of crazy Snakefinger style sounds out of it by combining the fretless sound with trem, but the loss of sustain and the lack of depth to the trem itself (only about a tone or so either way, and if you pull notes sharp with too much vim or gusto, you're pretty like to bend the bar itself into something pretty unusable anyway. Plus, it's so flimsy a spring that the whole thing rests on that just the action of the bar swinng causes the guitar to go out of tune. not cool for openchord drone stuff. In all likelihood, it'll come off and be put into something else. One can only hope its next home will be equally monstrous.

What was there when I bought was average all the way. These are not made by luthiers in the strictest sense of the word, really, but it's serviceable. I could play real songs on it before I mangled it., Intonation was lousy, and the metal is not real strong, and the tuners have that classic half are too loose and half you can barely turn thing going, but you know, what you pay for

I bought it to replace the torured Hi-Lo, and I never managed to wreck it. The trem absorbs all the shock you could pour into it. It unfortunately also refuses to soundlike it's being hurt, so it's not a great noise guitar. I would be more worried about trying to find a band who digs the souds it makes than about playing gigs with it at this point

You bought it for you kid for Christmas because he swore to god he wanted to learn to play guitar, and he either lost interest in two weeks because it wasn't easy right away or something went wrong (wouldn't stay in tune, pickups stopped working &c) that made the kid lose interest and it spent the next 30 years in a closet until you sold it for ten bucks. I personally think that was Sears' plan from the beginning. If that counts as a warrantee then 10, but I don't know...

All I can say is it's worth ruining a guitar this way. it's so incredibly easy, and you really will play it ten times morethan you ever played it in original form. If you like Eastern Sounding stuff, it's a really cheap way to cop it. You won't regret it.