At some point in a woman’s life, she needs to impulse buy a vintage cheapo guitar just because it looks like one of her nicest guitars melted then froze back in a weird shape.
Quick correction — I picked up this guitar without researching it much. Turns out these were made in Texas, not Japan.
This guitar is an absolute weirdo. It blissfully weighs just 5lbs and the pickups really rip with some distortion. On the weird side, the saddle doesn’t even have notches cut into it, which is my first time seeing that.
I’ll be replacing the wiring and probably the tuning machines as well as the nut. Whatever changes I make, I’ll do my best to maintain the mojo of the guitar — I won’t be refinishing, swapping the pickups (yet), or even adding notches to the saddle. Mostly, I want to turn this into a reliable gigging guitar.
Signal chain:
Spruce Effects Gale
Dwarfcraft Grazer
Chase Bliss/Cooper FX Generation Loss
Bookworm Effects Delayvid Foster Wallace
Milkman The Amp
Video Transcript
Note: a machine made this, so it’s not perfect, but if you’re hearing impaired and have any questions about what we said, please feel free to ask us in the comments or send us an email with the form below.
This Guitar Could be My TunaTone’s Older Sister (Alamo Fiesta Demo)
Hey, I’m Emily from the good offset podcast. And I’m going to talk about my new, old guitar. This here, Alamo Fiesta that I picked up, um, on Instagram, uh, Steve Selvidge from the Hold Steady saw it. And, uh, I guess it reminded him of my tunatone guitar and I can see why, let me grab that one really quickly and do a little side by side for you all whoop.
[00:00:38] So. I can see why he was reminded of it. Uh, this is a true pink. This used to be, I assume that a Fiesta red type color, um, too, me, this one, this Fiesta looks like the tunatone, uh, melted and then refroze in a weird way. Um, the way about the say and this to say about five pounds, uh, the pickups are reminiscent of each other and in my eyes, um, but there’s obviously a lot of differences.
[00:01:07] I don’t want to compare these two guitars. I don’t want to compare a guitar. I picked up for 325 bucks versus a hand craft. Good instrument by a wonderful Luthier in Canada. Uh, that’s a weird thing to do. Uh, it’s putting out the aesthetics and the similarities in a broad way. I, I think are fair. Um, yeah, it’s funny to think that this is an old, Oh, the Japanese.
[00:01:31] Cheapy guitar, which is what Leila has always told me. She was largely inspired by, in terms of design, for sure. Her, uh, teeny tuna drop that back up there.
[00:01:46] Alright, so let’s talk about this thing. I, as already mentioned, five pounds, a very lightweight guitar, neck shape, kind of a D I would say, pretty comfortable. I haven’t measured the nut width, but it feels, uh, narrow enough to make me happy. The two single coil pickups that I’ll, I’ll do a little bit play through.
[00:02:12] I’ll pick up Slack after that seems to vaguely work of volume and tone controls, which also seem to vaguely work. Um, I mean, they’re functional, but there’s just not, it’s pretty. Yeah. Like it feels a little bit on and off for the volume and a little. Uh, bright and mellow for the tone and not a lot of in between.
[00:02:33] There’s some interesting things about this guitar. Um, what do I wanna talk about first? Um, I guess I want to talk about the, the nut is not quite even, which I think is a pretty simple fix I’ll I’ll put up some pictures and B roll and stuff. Um, Yes. So it’s much closer to the top than the bottom. And actually frankly, a little odd, uh, the tuning machines sort of work the, the B uh, I can’t turn with, uh, the left hand as easily.
[00:03:11] It’s, uh, it’s a little stuck, the bridge. It’s interesting. I, it looks like I can be compensated for height by just sort of turning your fingers there. Uh, but I haven’t really gotten that to work for actual compensation or changing of the height, not a big deal. It’s not something I do a lot of, and this is probably not a guitar I’m going to be playing high up on the neck with the most interesting thing to me about this weirdo, um, is that the, the saddle.
[00:03:46] Is just a piece of wood. That’s been set at a bit of an angle, uh, not dissimilar to, uh, some acoustic bridges, I suppose, uh, to help, um, saddles, but there aren’t any are not any notches cut into it at all. It’s just, it’s sort of like a zero fret for your bridge and saddle area. Really really interesting, but I think it’s a fun guitar.
[00:04:18] Um, I’m going to play a little bit out of it in a minute here. I think it sounds pretty awful without distortion. So I’m going to make sure to include plenty of that. I’m going to play it through my entire pedal board set up. That is a Gale, uh, going into specific scale, going into the dwarf craft Grazer, going into the generation loss by, uh, chase plus and Cooper FX going into the delay, David Foster Wallace, um, by the core of effects.
[00:04:49] And then the amp I’ll be using is milkman the amp. Alright, thanks for watching.