Squier Bullet Telecaster gets returned

The magic just wasn't there.

Above is a guitar I bought (for a very nice price) but had to return because it was yet again one of those things where it didn't survive the honeymoon period.

I'll explain.

As I've said before, I've never played a guitar that felt or sounded perfect on the first try. What happens is that I'll try a guitar in the store I know I can afford, and if I think it will be okay, I'll make the buy and take it home.

Once I get the guitar back home, that's when the honeymoon period begins. I install new strings of my preferred thickness, set the guitar up and then hope for the best.

In the past, there have been a few guitars I bought and returned the same day because I would discover something very wrong after getting it back to the house. For example, one of those was a Thinline Telecaster I bought where it sounded fantastic in the store, but back at the house I found it had electronics issues that would require gutting and rewiring the entire guitar. I wasn't having any of that, so back to the store it went.

The Bullet Telecaster I just returned didn't have any such issues and stayed at home for a little while before getting returned.

What happened this time around was just a "meh" feeling. The guitar just wasn't speaking to me. Sounded fine, played fine, but the magic wasn't there. I can't describe it any better than that.

Sometimes you will come across guitars like this. You'll get the guitar, everything checks out okay, you install the strings you like, set it up exactly the way you want, but it just won't sing for you.

I'll end this one by telling you a very weird thing about guitars.

Take two guitars that come off the production line that are exactly the same. Brand and price doesn't matter. Both guitars are the same color, same shape, same everything.

It is absolutely possible that one of them will play wonderfully and the other will be awful, even though they're both the same.

The reason this happens is that there are no two guitars that are absolutely 100% identical to each other, and to this day there is no manufacturing process where a guitar is built all by robot. Every guitar constructed at some point has human hands touch it to finalize the build process.

Also, no two necks are exactly the same either. For two guitars that are the same model, one may have a neck that flexes more and the other less, resulting in a very different way each of them play.

This is, incidentally, why you should try two like-to-like guitars when in the guitar store whenever possible. It's almost a certainty that one will play better than the other.

Published 2023 Jul 18

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