Of course it’s a seemingly impossible task, so I did/do need help. So, I figured I’d give it a shot! I’m going to try to list every damn brand name that was ever placed on the headstock of a 1960s Japanese guitar!! A lot of this information is already out there floating around like tiny puzzle pieces, and all I’m trying to do is collect it in one place. At the end of his list he wrote that it was time to start tracking all the names down but in the almost 20 years that have followed, I haven’t seen anyone else try. What he did was compile a list of brand names and distributors/importers where known. Way back in the 1995 the early legend of guitar research, Michael Wright, published a short list like this in his book Guitar Stories Volume One. In addition to the original global tone and volume knobs, we added a gain control with an LED indicator, and the original tone-bypass rocker is now a phase-reverse switch.Īs for that new amp, not only is it two and a half times louder than the original but it also offers extra routing choices: the unpowered output, a headphone output that bypasses the speaker and an output from the internal amp so you can use it as a preamp or fuzz box in your signal chain.OK, I think it’s time for a list like this. The dual pickups are similar to gold foils and sound chimey, jangly and very musical Ronni just happened to have a pickup that matched the original, and since we were installing the new amp, we figured we’d add it, along with a pickup switch, located in the lower cutaway. Note, however, that the TRG-1 has only one pickup (Teisco’s TRG-2 was the two-pickup version).

They sound terrific with distortion as well, and seem to emphasize just the tones you’d want to hear feed back. Played clean, they’re super-nice for rhythm tones ranging from surf to soul. The dual pickups are similar to gold foils and sound chimey, jangly and very musical. Also surprising is the fact that this guitar has 22 frets on a rosewood fingerboard adorned with cool art deco–style markers.

The neck is chunky, like an old Fender U shape, but the action is low and surprisingly playable.

Besides having a body shaped like a lopsided pear and a headstock like a hitchhiker’s thumb, this guitar has a friggin’ amp built into it! Playability & Sound

Teisco guitar identification