Vester Thinline 'Hybrid'

This guitar defies categorization. It is a mixture of many design features and construction methods. I don't know when/where it was made, nor have I any idea just who the Vester Company was? 4-bolt, 22 fret wide thin, maple neck with a rosewood fretboard. Tilt-back hockey stick shape headstock. Thinline (like a tele thinline) strat shape body that is extremely light. I can't tell what kind of wood is under the glossy red paint? Single volume and tone control and 3 way pickup selector switch like a tele. 17k ohm single coil pickup in the neck position, 40k ohm humbucker pickup in the bridge position. Passive electronics. Tune-a-matic style bridge with stop-bar tailpiece. All gold hardware. I had been looking for a thinline tele and this seemed to fit the requirements pretty well.

Those high-output pickups really crank out some juice. The neck pickup wails the blues with some kind of authority. The bridge pickup shreds like a runaway buzz-saw blade. The combo position has some great quack. What else can a guy ask for? I'm not a big fan of guitars with a top covered with multi-coil, switchable phase pickups allowing 15 plus combinations. I am a simple person, and can only deal with 3 combinations. Noiseless electronics. Pots with some decent control range. Nicely balanced and lightweight for those long jam sessions, yet solid enough to have some balls and great sustain.

This guitar was posibly 15? years old when I got it. Probably has been through multiple owners and countless adjustments over the years. The original finish is still very good, the gold is not worn through anywhere, just slightly tarnished in a couple of areas. The neck is one of the most comfortable profiles/shapes that I've ever used. Wide enough to give some room to wander, thin enough for my medium sized hands. Satiny smooth and fast. Medium size frets, closer to a fender radius. This guitar is a pleasure to play.

Like I said above this guitar is in superb condition. Obviously the previous owners did not abuse it, but it also shows that it was pretty solidly built. It is almost imposible to play this thing out of tune, it is solid. The tightest neck/body joint of any guitar I've ever had. Good solid ballsy sound indicates some quality design/construction.

The other reviews of Vester guitars seem to indicate that the company existed in the mid-80's sometime?? They certainly aren't around anymore. They probably had these guitars made on contract in some foreign sweatshop. They certainly knew how to design/build guitars wherever that was.

I've been hacking away on 6 string fretboards for about 37 years. I'm not hard to please, I just expect decent overall performance for the dollars I spend. Neither am I easy to please, I have some minimum expectations that alot of the expensive guitar's that exist can't meet. I was looking for a tele thinline style when I happened across this. I had been looking for a l-o-n-g time for a tele thinline because mostly I couldn't see putting out the kind of money that those things normally fetch. This Vester guitar fits the bill quite well. It isn't shaped like a tele but does have a hardtail, simple electronics and a mid-sized, chambered, semi-hollow body. Best of all, it has a unique combination of sounds and tones, and is comfortable and lightweight.