SX STL-50
I bought this guitar in just after Christmas 2005 from Rondo Music over the Internet. I had wanted a Tele style guitar for a while, and, at $109 and with mostly positive reviews from others, I decided to go for it.
The body finish isn't quite as light of a butterscotch yellow as the picture on the Rondo site would lead you to think. It's actually more of a yellow mustard color. The finish is the typical thick poly style gives the guitar kind of a plastic feel. You can see some grain through the finish though which is nice.
The neck has a vintage tint to it that looks good and gives the guitar some character. The finish here is also kind of thick but it wasn't quite as bad as some had said. I had thought I'd need to wear it down with steel wool but it feels fine as is.
The fretwork was actually pretty good. I was expecting the worst, that I would have to do some leveling, but so far everything seems fine. The frets are jumbo, like you would find on a shredder guitar, not a vintage looking Tele style guitar. I actually kind of like this combo so far.
The nut is what I'd call OK. It's getting the job done so far but I've had to widen it on the treble side to accommodate 11's better. I'm going to replace it with a Tusq nut at some point.
The die-cast tuners are adaquate but needed a little lubrication and tightening to get them into shape. Overall, the tuning stability is good.
The bridge is the weak point in this guitar. It has an overall cheap feel to it and getting the saddles to align right and to intonate right was a bit of trouble. The adjustment screws were soft and I had to exercise some care to avoid stripping them. As noted below, I eventually changed out the bridge.
As for the stock electronics, they weren't too bad considering. The bridge pickup had a decent amount of Tele-ish snap to it. The pots turned easily and smoothly and weren't loose feeling. They worked well for volume swells. The switch seems a little iffy though. The neck pickup wasn't very good at all, tending to come off rather weak and lacking in traditional Tele-ish neck tones.
Modifications
As decent as this guitar was for a $109 I wasn't content to leave it alone. I had bought it to mod it and I decided to 'Esquire' it.
This meant removing the neck pickup and replacing the pickguard with one without a hole. When I removed the neck pickup and discovered that the neck rout is humbucker sized. This leaves the door open to future mods if I decide to do them. The bridge is routed single coil only though. I put in a GFS Repro 50's Tele pickup and their Mint Green Esquire pickguard.
The only hitch I encountered was that the pickguard didn't fit exactly right. I shaved it down some to get it in position right. Oddly enough, I also noticed signs that someone at the factory had done the same to the stock pickguard.
Next came wiring up the unique Esquire setup. In this wiring configuration, the switch in the bridge position bypasses the tone control, in the middle enables the tone control, and in the neck position it enables a bass simulation circuit while also bypassing the tone control. As part of this change I also upgraded the pots and switch to full sized CTS pots and a Oaks-Grigby switch and I also used Mallory caps. This made volume and tone adjustments, particularly those done while playing, very smooth sounding.
The GFS pickup does sound a whole lot better than the stock SX. It has more range and depth to it. In the no tone selection there is more bite and clarity to the tone. In the 'bass' selection, it has that classic muffled 'wet blanket' tone. I don't care for that setting too much in general although I've found it to be an interesting change of pace sometimes.
Soon after this modification was completed, I decided to upgrade the bridge as well. I selected a vintage 3 barrel Tele style bridge from GuitarFetish. However, this bridge was not a direct fit replacement. The stock SX bridge is longer, has more screws and holds the pickup at a different angle. This required drilling new holes and slightly routing out the bridge pickup area in order to get everything to fit OK. Here's a picture of this modification. The red arrow points to the filled in holes from the original bridge.
Sounds
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
There are 2 separate clips spliced together on this track. Both use the Esquire tone bypass setting. Jam tracks are providing the background music.
The first half is a country clip that uses the V-Amp Bassman emulation with a little reverb and delay and a lot of compression. The second one is blues and uses my V-Amp's "Breakin' Blues" patch.
My Performances on SoundClick that Feature This Guitar
