Squier Classic Vibe 50's Tele

[tjnugent]

I just bought a Squier Classic Vibe 50's Tele for $349 and it is an amazing guitar. I have other Squier guitars and I like them but usually after I have hotrodded them with new pickups and tuners. but this one has great pickups and great vintage fender style tuners.

The neck is maple and solid. The color is a cream white with a black pickguard. The pots are solid and smooth. This is now my favorite guitar. I have a Vox Night Train amp head with a 112TV cabinet with an Eminence Red Fang alnico speaker. The combination is way past good and coming close to amazing.

If you are looking for a tele and you dont want to pay big bucks for an Fender American made tele.... Go and play this guitar. It is the best guitar for the money I have seen.

[Teleblooz]

A friend of mine has one and said pretty much the same thing.

[tjnugent]

I am certainly not trying to over sell this guitar, but I am pretty much blown away by how good it feels and sounds.... The pickups are well balance and you can get a lot of expression out of this guitar, clean and overdriven.

Anyone else play a Squier they like?

Ted

[necksnapper]

Love my custom II, and I've been reading lots of posts on the tele forum and most everybody feels the same as you. I finally picked one up today and I gotta say... Awesome. Impressed me more than anything I've picked up in a long time.

[stevewf]

Picked up a Squier Classic Vibe 50's Telecaster a couple months ago (i.e. February 2022), and I'm pleased. It's the only tele I've ever owned, and the only one I've ever played for that matter. It's been a nice welcome to the Telecaster world. I chose this one because I wanted something pretty classic, with decent, mod-able quality but without emptying the wallet. It happens to be the lowest-cost string-through tele by Squier, a feature that intrigued me - also never owned a string-through-wood electric. I got this one refurbed, so the original serial number is covered by a new one on a sticker, and the word "USED" is stamped faintly into the back of the headstock (stamped with a press, not ink) - as disclosed by the seller.

I'm pleased, though there were some glitches, one of which I think should be a no-no for Squier (the bad jack wire).

Its body is a little thicker (1-1/2 inches, ie 44mm) than what photos of cheaper models show, and the weight reflects it. Haven't put it on a scale, but it is substantial. Must be the density of the (reportedly) pine body?
The tuners are the classic type with split/hollow pegs and vintage-style flat covers on the back. They work well, though the buttons feel a bit small to me.
The saddles are the type with pairs of strings per saddle (total of three saddles), which invites intonation "problems", what I've learned is typical of a tele.
String-though body.
The neck pickup is the classic covered single coil.
The bridge pickup, also the single coil variety, is plenty powerful, with strong magnets. These two factors dictate that the pickup be adjusted pretty low, both for volume balance with the neck pickup and to avoid "strat-itis" magnetism problems. No matter, there's plenty. This model does the twang thang, with is what I really wanted when I began looking at telecasters, so I love it.
Bone nut. Cupped jack. Dime-sized pots that are quiet and smooth (at least while new). Bonus: a true 2-pole three-throw selector switch .
It has a maple fretboard, nickel-plated fittings, black pickguard, butterscotch blonde body with gloss finish all around, same being amber tinted on the neck and fretboard. Yum.
I measured the fretboard radius at 9.5, not compound. Very thin up by the headstock. Feels very nice along the whole length.

I enjoy tweaking guitars, so the lower cost of the Squier compared to the Fender line is attractive. If I spent $thousands, I would keep my meddling hands out of the guitar, but the lower price makes me feel more at liberty to mod away, which I'll do with moderation on this already good guitar.
Here's what I've done so far, and why:

• Shielded the control cavity with copper foil.
• Filed the nut slots lower. They were very high from the factory, which is not great for beginners/toll-less players, but ok for a someone who's prepared to do their own setup.
  
• Added a second string retainer. With the re-shaped nut, I find that real hard bends on the "G" on low frets makes the string pop out of the nut slot. Maybe I snapped it too low? The string is about half-depth in the slot, which I thought was the target. The added string retainer, which holds the G and D, fixed it.
• Replaced the saddles with some compensated ones. Tuning is better, just about perfect now.
• Separated the neck pickup's shielding from its return wire. I intend to do some "in-series" wiring, and/or maybe some phase swapping, so the shielding has to be separated or it'll be Hum City. 
• Shielded the control cavity and the back of the neck pickup with copper foil. Maybe the noise is reduced a little, though there's still hum. Live-able.
• Replaced the neck pickups pair of unshielded wiring with shielded 2-conductor. Also part of the prep for re-wiring, mentioned above. I wish this were the standard --  except that push-back insulation is so easy. So my pickup has shielded wiring until the control cavity (itself shielded), where I spliced pushback. 3 leads, of course, since I separated the shielding.
• Replaced the jack wire. The factory wire was noisy, which took me three days to pinpoint. It was making crackling noises, especially while using Neck or Neck+Bridge pickup combos. Finally confirmed the culprit by squeezing/manipulating that wire without playing. My troubleshooting went off trail because of the "especially Neck" bit. The noise was actually occurring in all positions, but I didn't experience it in Bridge position, and the reason is that the noise happens when the guitar is jarred, as when playing hard; since the bridge pickup is so loud, I don't tend to play it as hard as the neck pickup, so the guitar is not being jarred. Or, if I do play the bridge pickup hard, the crackle is buried under loud music (aka twaddle). This slowed the troubleshooting. This is, in fact, why I already replaced the neck pickup's wire - part of t-shooting the crackling noise. BTW, the factory wire is a shielded single-conductor cable, a proper choice (and so is the replacement wire); just went wrong here.
  

Future:

• Enable series and/or OoP sounds. This'll require replacing the 3-way switch and/or adding a push-pull switch or two. As mentioned, the neck pickup's shielding has been separated in order to have this without extra hum.
• Straighten the neck pickup's cover (see "problems", below)

Of all those mods, I'd say the most intrusive was to add the second string retainer, since it required a hole being drilled in the face of the headstock. No UNDO available for this one! I browsed photos of teles with twin retainers for two days first. Aside from that, all the other mods I've done are reversible and/or invisible, and I intend to keep it that way. The guitar has a classic look/feel to it that I don't want to disturb (the string retainer, in my opinion, preserves this).

Problems from the factory:

• Nut slots were too shallow, nut too tall. This is pretty normal. It's the factory being conservative.
• Uncompensated saddles make for bad intonation. 
• String-though ferrules are uneven against the flush back of the body. Through further reading, I'm led to understand this is difficult to do perfectly. Nitpicking here, and I don't really mind, just mentioning for those interested.
• Jack wire is noisy (read above). Squier shouldn't have been using that wire stock. Admittedly, the problem may have been hard to notice by QC, but then, there must have been many other guitars suffering similarly.
• Neck pickup has a slight tilt. Its top is pointed toward the neck. This is because the way the metal pickup cover is crimped onto the fiber baseplate; the cover actually twists the ends of the baseplate, where the pickup mounting screws go, so the pickup is tilted in relation to the pickguard. This makes it so the pickup can't be put as close to the strings because the cover's edge gets too close first.

Why I love this guitar:

• Tele twang. Mine at last.
• The finish is beautiful. Classic Butterscotch Blonde/Black/Nickel.
• Frets, while not shined to a perfect polish, have fairly smooth ends. So far, no high/low spots found.
• It feels so solid!

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