Squier Standard Fat Telecaster review

The Squier Standard Fat Telecaster is a well built, versatile guitar. Squier has discontinued it not so long ago (past the mid 2000s), but you can still find used ones for a good price. It has the regular Telecaster shaped body made out of Agathis wood finished in two tone sunburst – Squier calls it antique burst. The guitar was made in Indonesia.

Just like an old one – almost

The tuning pegs are chrome plated, sealed ones. There are two string trees on the headstock, they are the butterfly kind, so they can throw you out of tune after wider string bends, because of the fraction between them and the surface of the strings. Do yourself a favor and replace them with the roller kind. The nut is 42 mm wide, the scale length is 25.5” – everything is regular Fender sized. The neck is made of one piece of maple, with a rosewood fretboard on top of it, the fret markers are simple pearl dots. The truss rod channel is rear routed, so the back of the neck has the so called “skunk stripe”, which is a walnut insert covering the truss rod.

Fat humbucker – too fat

The guitar has a chromed control plate with two control knobs – volume and tone – and a three way switch. The bridge is also chrome plated. It’s the modern, six saddle kind with a regular single coil tele pickup sitting slanted in the middle of it. This kind of bridge is good, because you can intonate each string properly. Don’t buy into the vintage 3-saddle bridge mojo. Not today! The bridge pickup has six alnico magnet rods. The pickguard is a three ply black-white-black one, with a PAF-style metal covered humbucker pickup in the neck position. This pickup is rather muddy sounding, especially in contrast with the bridge pickup. The body of course doesn’t have any contouring, but hey, it’s a bona fide Tele.

The usual jack

The jack cup that’s on the bottom side of the guitar can come loose altogether – it’s an old but overlooked design flaw of the Telecaster – so you might want to invest into an Electrosocket one.