Vester Tradition Series Telecaster

Okay, folks - to once and for all end the discussion about where these mysterious Vesters were made while writing a review on my "Telecaster"-ripoff I`m getting a bit Off-Topic here:

The guitar was made by the Korean Sae Han (Samick/EMG/Axtech/...) guitar company in the late 80s/early 90s. It is a pre-lawsuit model from the highly popular range of excellent guitar-copies that made the Vester brand so famous but also lead to its` early demise when the Fender company sued them after having discovered that Vester used a "soundalike" logo which was - like the japanese Tokai logos - written using the same "spaghetti" font as Fender. But even worse - Vester came up with a guitar line that was named "Tradition Series" and included retrostyle guitar models that were basically ripoffs of the guitars that have made the Fender, Gibson, Jackson and PRS - companies so famous. Like pre-CBS Strato- and Telecasters, Precision - and Jazzbass, Les Paul, the Gibson 335, the SG, The PRS Santana model et.c .Though priced intermediately, these copies have all designed for the advanced or professional player, and the Samuel Music company in Effingham, Illinois, who once had launched the "Vester" brand even had won some pros as Endorsers for their guitars like the Country - *AND Western band Alabama.
The Tradition series guitars all came with GOTOH hardware and passive EMG - pickups and are - with the exception of a few minor details - built to the exact specs of the Originals. The tonewoods used are of a very good quality and also matched to the originals (ash and alder for the Stratocaster and Telecaster copies, mahogany for the Les Paul copies...).
There were also some other - cheaper - guitar series from Vester that could not hold up to the high standard set on their Tradition Series of instruments like the "Stage Series", "Voyager Series", and "Maniac Series" but are still a good find if you compare these to other so-called "entry- to intermediate-level" guitars on the market today.
Along with the Vester guitars came a range of small solidstate practice amps that were manufactured by the Vestax company in Japan. Vester never has made any guitars in Japan!

And now back to this particular axe:
It is basically a clone of a 1957 Fender Telecaster featuring a one-piece ash body, vintagestyle GOTOH copies of early Kluson tuners, a onepiece maple neck with rosewood skunkstripe at the back and rosewood plug in the headstock to cover the trussrod, spaghetti font logo on the headstock, black bakalite scratchplate that is attached with 5 screws, 2 singlecoil pickups from EMG, 2 turning knobs for volume and tone, a 3-way switch with the odd-looking top hat knob, Telecaster bridge with body-stringthru and three brass saddles. The guitar comes in a beautiful butterscotch-blonde and apart from the different logos on the waterslide-decal of the headstock, the backplate of the neck and the bridge and the thin acrylic laquer finish and the "modern" pickups and electronics you just can`t tell it apart from an old Original. I have seen many Fender knockoffs in the past that were loudly claimed to be clones of the real thing but couldn`t even come close in their construction and soundwise you could just forget about them. This one comes so incredibly close it`s scary. Very scary. A real 1:1 copy of a classic guitar that has become a legend and an institution in our musical world.
For the Telecaster was the world`s first mass-manufactured electric guitar it doesn`t offer "tons of features", so I`m not giving it a "10" here.

I mostly play C&W, Rock and Jazz - the guitar is a real allrounder and can handle anything you throw at it, and that`s what I call value!
I use the Tele with a vintage Carlsbro 50 TOP head and a H|H 2x12" cabinet, with some slapback delay and a Fender tube reverb box as only effects sometimes.
It isn`t noisy anymore since I have fully shielded it.
Though there are only a bass and a treble pickup you can get sounds galore, the bass pickup is punchy enough to make the bassplayer superfluous in your band and the treble pickup offers twang galore, and by twang I mean aggressively stinging vintage twangbite that can easily cut through any mix and not the soft castrated "rounded" sound of todays` so-called vintage pickup replicas that sell for an arm and a leg. The overall tone character is that of ash and maple which is IMHO a great combination for a guitar used to play Rock`n`Roll.
Well, likes? Anything!
Dislikes I haven`t found so far.

Though not facory-new anymore I`d say that this is one of the best factory guitars I have ever come across - properly built from quality parts by people who know what they are doing. What else could one ask for?

Being a Telecaster style guitar that IMHO is worth bearing the original Fender Logo on it - the thing has already proven to be built like a tank - a bunch of drunks attacked me when I played in a pub and I had nothing to defend myself but my Vester Tele which survived the quick abuse as a replacement for a baseball bat unscratched.
Since that day it is my main guitar when gigging and I can fully depend on it. I have a Fender Stratocaster as a backup guitar because the best axe doesn`t guarantee that the strings all survive a gig.

I have never dealt with Samuel Music/Musicorp, so I can`t tell.
I bought this guitar second-hand last year, when it wasn`t under warranty anymore.

I have started playing guitar in 1992 and besides the gear already mentioned I have a Fender Precision fretless bass from the 60s and a Glockenklang bass combo amplifier. I use National fingerpicks, Fender Celluloid plecs and Wegen Fatone picks. And lot of time and patience practicing.
I have bought this guitar in reminiscence of the first electric guitar I ever held in hands - a Fender "Nocaster" that hung in the window of a small mom & pop music shop in our town and was for sale for the incredible sum of 25.000 Deutschmarks back in 1992. Every morning on my way to school I passed the little music shop and stopped to marvel at the guitars presented in the shop window. There was a large red Gretsch, a blue Fender Stratocaster, a bunch of Acoustics and this other electric guitar that didn`t wear a brand name on the headstock and looked different from the others presented there. It was the simple and elegant functional design that made me stop in my tracks and look at it many times untill I could not stand it anymore and entered the shop to ask about the guitar that already appeared in my dreams.
The shop was run by an older friendly gentleman who had seen me staring at the guitars in the shop window many times and was quite amused that I finally dared to enter the shop. He already knew what I was looking for and told me that if I handled it carefully I could take a closer look at the old guitar. With big eyes I watched him as he took the Fender Nocaster out of the window, attached a leather strap to it, tuned the strings, took a cable and connected it to an old tube guitar amp that he called a Bassman amp. Then he demonstrated to me how the electric guitar sounds and how it works in general and also gave me some tips and advice on buying a guitar and how to tell if the guitar is "a life one". This special tip I`d like to share with you: let the guitar hang down from the neck and pluck the B-string, and while it rings slightly touch it with your fingertips close to the strap button at the end of the body. If you can feel the string vibration there you have found a good one with rich dynamics. If you don`t feel anything the guitar is dead.
I finally was allowed to try out the Fender myself and make the "life one?" test. It was indeed a good guitar and the string vibe going through the body felt like blood rushing through a human body. I got a guitar lesson on the Tele: how to hold and strum it and a few basic chords and was allowed to just play the guitar for several hours that rang and sang even under the clumsy hands of the guitar beginner I was back then. I saved my pocket money to take some more guitar lessons from the old gentleman who happended to be a retired pro guitarist and music teacher. And because I didn`t have an own guitar back then I got a cheap japanese Tele knockoff for rent on which I could practice at home while during lessons I could always use the Nocaster of which he said that it needed to be played on and on to keep it alive. A few years later my family moved to another city where I didn`t find someone to give me guitar lessons. So I bought a beaten-up Fender Stratocaster with swimmingpool-routing, modded it to my likes and joined a Punkrock band as rythm guitarist. A lot of guitars have passed through my hands since then and I have tried out many Telecasters and Telestyle guitars but never bought them because I still had the Nocaster in mind and wanted a guitar at least nearly its`equal. Then I saw the pristine-looking Vester Telecaster at a colleague`s guitar collection and played it and played it and could not stop playing because I finally found what I was looking for all these years. And willingly payed the horrid sum of 1500 Euros for what has become my favourite guitar - besides a certain old Fender of course...