Teisco Del Rey ET-230 Guitar Review

Teisco Del Rey ET-230 Guitar Review

Scott loaned me his Teisco Del Rey model ET-230, to get my impressions of it. You may have seen his article here about how he came to obtain it.

This is really a piece of history, in a sense. In their day, Teisco guitars were what many people bought who couldn’t afford a Fender or a Gibson. They were sold at some of the major department/discount stores (sometimes under the store’s brand-name), inexpensive and readily accessible. But for all that, the build-quality wasn’t so bad, actually. Being a Japanese company, they had some pretty different ideas about what made for a playable, useful instrument.

This particular guitar is what I’ve always called their ‘Jetsons’ guitar, because of the ‘futuristic’angular body shape. It has two single-coil pickups, and did have separate rocker switches for each, as well as something like a ‘Vari-Tone’ rotary switch which shuffled different capacitors into the circuit for different tones. On Scott’s specimen, those features were degraded to the point of uselessness, so he had swapped them out for a more conventional 3-way pickup switch and a master tone & master volume pot…which is much easier to deal with anyway.

The body on the Teisco Del Rey ET-230 Guitar is rather thin & lightweight, and the neck has a pretty thin profile, as well, but is very comfortable to play on. Those single-coil pickups give it plenty of ‘twang’ with decent output, which is why a lot of the surf-rock guys like those old Teiscos so much. The bridge is rather better than many Jap guitars of the period, having short segments of what appears to be threaded rod for saddles (you can actually vary the string spacing), which are then adjustable for intonation. The vibrato mechanism… well…it’s typical of the era of Jap guitars. It’s probably useful enough as a vibrato within a quarter-step of pitch, but definitely not for any EVH-style dive-bombing.

It’s actually kind of fun to play, and definitely brings back some memories of my first forays into guitar playing ages ago. I had never played a Teisco of this particular model before, though. It’s very cool to play the ‘Peter Gunn’ theme on, or ‘Secret Agent Man’(if you’re old enough to remember either of those tunes). It just has the exact tone that you want for that sort of thing. Crank in lots of reverb, twang away!Not a lot of sustain there, though. You’re not going to get any modern rock tones from it, certainly not anything ‘metal’. But it does make one reminisce about some tunes from days long gone (There’s a man who leads a life of danger...). If you can, you need to pick up and collect a nice Teisco Del Rey ET-230 Guitar!