I bought the Mexican Telecaster from two guys at a flea market in Germany. Plenty of guitars have passed through my hands, including a Gibson that cost far more, and yet the Telecaster is still the one I reach for most often.
I wrote about the first classical guitar from Lidl and how I started playing in Almost twenty years with a guitar. This post is about the guitars I bought later. I remember some of those purchases well, even though the instruments themselves have moved on.
Second-hand
After that first cheap Stratocaster from Allegro, I bought nearly every guitar from someone else, and roughly eight out of ten I found in Germany. Among them were an Epiphone, a Gibson Les Paul and a Japanese Stratocaster from the eighties. I play both acoustic and electric, but whenever I reach for an electric, it has been the same one for a long time.
Les Paul and Epiphone
The Les Paul sounded good, but the build quality did not convince me, and I don't think I was ever really comfortable on it, so I sold it quickly. The funny thing is that before that I had owned an Epiphone, the cheaper version of the same guitar, and with that one it was exactly the other way round: it sounded worse and was better made.
That comparison left me shaking my head. I liked the sound of the more expensive guitar, yet I did not want to keep it, while I remember the cheaper one more fondly for its build quality. The name on the headstock told me very little about whether I would actually want to play the instrument.
A flea market in Germany
I found the Telecaster at a flea market in Germany. Two guys were standing at one of the stalls with this very guitar, so I went over, picked it up and played for a little while. I fell for it straight away.
That did not mean I was going to pay what they asked, though. We haggled for a bit and settled on a price fifty euros lower than the one they had started with.
At the luthier's
From the market the guitar went to a luthier. After a setup, a fret levelling and a few other adjustments, he told me I had found a really good one, because he had not seen a Mexican Fender that sounded this good in a long time. It has sounded superb ever since.
Why this one
On paper it is just a Mexican Fender, yet I rate it above the Les Paul and the Japanese Stratocaster. What wins me over is its simplicity: two pickups, a three-way switch and a fixed bridge, and that is all. With nothing to distract me, I can concentrate on the playing itself, and I simply like the way it sounds.
That simplicity suits the variety of music I play, from rock and pop to jazz standards. I have never settled on a single genre, though I have certainly settled on this guitar.
The Telecaster has also been with me at the Zaduszki Literackie concerts, which I return to every November. After three years of rehearsals and gigs I have a lot more to go on than those few minutes at the market, and my opinion has not changed. Most of my other guitars were sold sooner or later.
This one is definitely staying.