Imagine if you can, the secret love child of Les Paul, Leo Fender and Rick Turner. Now pick yourself up of the floor and meet the Telstar 2. This guitar has the solid neck joint of a Les Paul, the radiused body of a Model 1 and a shape inspired by a telecaster. By making the body from two, oppositely radiused pieces of wood, combined with a set neck and stacked heel, this guitar produces extraordinary sustain and warmth as well as a range of different tones.
The standard Telstar 2 model combines a piezo pickup in the bridge with a coil tapped humbucker in a rotating ring at the neck. Each pickup can be selected individually or together, or blended with a custom potentiometer and pre-amp circuit to create an almost infinate number of tones.
You can choose a range of custom options including inlays, laminated necks and your own choice of pickup. Due to the unique rotating pickup mount, wider pickups such as soap bar P90s can not be used but single coil P90s in a humbucker footprint (Alchemist Hybrids) are an option. A more traditional telecaster combination of single coil neck and bridge pickups is an alternative. The cost for a standard configuration of this guitar is £1495 with custom options avaialble for a small additional charge, as shown in our configuration tool below. Build time is currently between 8 and 12 weeks but please enquire because we often have standard models in stock for immediate shipping.
The body of this guitar is made from two separate pieces of wood. For flamed maple topped guitars, the maple cap and mahogany back are each radiused separately, chambered, carved and jointed together. Poplar burl caps are steam treated and bent over the radiused mahogany back. Stains are used to reveal the natural grain of the wood, with a range of different colours and patterns available. The body is sealed and finished with a clear, durable polyurethane finish.
The standard neck is made from maple with a Pau Ferro or Rosewood fret board, metalic eccentric fret markers and a dual action truss rod, accessed from the headstock but hidden with a cover that matches the top. Inlays at the 12th fret, such as our feline motif, are an option. 3x3 Hipshot locking tuners provide excellent tuning stability and wide Nickel-Silver fret wire is used and complemented with a hand-carved bone nut. The neck has 24 frets and uses a 24.75 inch or 628 mm scale. Other scale lengths are available on request. The neck has a stacked heel made of maple and mahogany sandwiched with ebony veneer and is joined to the body with a tenon and also treated with a satin or gloss polyurethane finish.
The Telstar 2 uses a Hot Slag Humbucking pickup from Iron Gear in the neck position. It is mounted in a circular holder made from bubinga that allows the pickup to be rotated to adjust the tone. This high gain pickup produces a beautiful warm, clean sound at low volumes but generates absolute filth when the gain is increased. The pickup can be coil-tapped with a push-pull volume pot. A three-way switch allows selection between the neck pickup and a piezo pickup integrated into the tunomatic bridge. A push-pull switch on the tone potentiometer switches in a blending potentiometer that allows the contribution of neck and bridge pickups to be blended, allowing a huge range of sounds from heavy rock, to jazz to 6 and 12 string acoustic sounds.
An alternative configuration is to use traditional telecaster pickups in neck and bridge positions to provide a more vintage sound but within a modern, styled body.
