You get what you pay for.

Race Green with a rosewood fingerboard.

You get what you pay for. Clichés clichés everywhere. Of course you get what you pay for but the one that really irks me is: it's good for the money. I see this everywhere in 'user' guitar reviews. Guys buy a guitar at a bargain price and the first thing they think and want to tell you is that: it's good for the money. Surely it's either good or not good and the price they paid for it doesn't really make it any better, or worse. So I decided to take a close look at the new Squier Affinity range from Fender and this Telecaster caught my eye.

The Fender Australia (Squier) website is a complete waste of bandwidth and I was unable to get an official image or any specs so I'll just have to busk it.

From other websites it would seem the new Squier Affinity guitars come in a multitude of modern colours. The one I tested was in Race Green with a rosewood fingerboard. I always thought green was bad luck for a race car, I wonder if Squier knew that? Anyway, it certainly looked stunning in what I would call aqua/pearl and the fingerboard appeared to be natural rosewood and not artificially darkened as seen on many Chinese copy instruments.

Starting at the pointy end the pure white (nearly) maple T style headstock featured a nice smooth set of standard chrome tuners and quite good quality for a budget Telecaster. You wouldn't need to replace these as you would with most MIC copies. It was nice to see the gold Squier logo and not the all-black logo of previous models. Just the one string tree stabilised the top two strings which left the G string free to do those chicken pickin' country style bends behind the nut. Cool.

The C shaped neck was finished in a clear matt finish poly and had a nice play-me feel to it. I've just spent a couple of days tweaking the nuts of a couple of my guitars and this takes some fine work to get right, particularly getting the open strings to sing and not zing like a sitar. The final adjustment work put into the nut at the Chinese factory was just perfect. A perfect set of well seated 21 medium jumbo frets brings us to the body. So far so good.

The poly paint finish once again was perfect and there were no sign of any joins in the slab body. I would be thinking the body is several pieces of basswood but that's okay, I love the sound of glue. A bolt on neck of course held on by four screws and a chrome plate engraved Squier by Fender. There's the usual chrome hardware however I felt the top-loader bridge was a bit of a disappointment. Although this may have its benefits, more later. I loved the knurled flat top knobs, they even had grub screws and not the push on variety. This means you can line up the screws as an indication of where your controls are set.

The electronics, well let's just say it sounded like a Tele. While some Chinese wound ceramic pickups can sound awesome some leave a bit to be desired. I would be replacing these if you wanted the guitar to have some soul. The pots no doubt would be the micro variety and should be changed when you upgrade the pickups. The three-way switch did seem quite substantial but the top-hat switch knob sat a bit high for my liking and didn't want to be set lower. It was nice to see the neck pickup body-mounted under the pristine white three layer pickguard and not hanging under the pickguard as usually seen on budget Tele's.

So to it's final destination, the output jack. Obviously a cost cutting measure as there was no traditional Tele cup mounted jack but only what we've seen in previous Affinity Telecasters, the jack mounted in a breakable plastic plate. So is there some truth in the cliché.. you only get what you pay for?

From a design perspective, nearly every Telecaster copy (including Fenders own copies) I find there is something odd about the upper bout, it just doesn't look right. Where the body meets the neck the little thingy (can you think of a name for it?) is quite often too shallow. I'm not sure why this is. Could it be too tight for the CNC machine or perhaps too tight for the buffer? Dunno, but when is a Tele not quite a Tele?

With just a few niggles the Squier Affinity Telecaster was a joy to play. Out of the box it was well setup and yes, it is not only good for the $350 you'll pay for it but it is simply great regardless of the money. For a first electric guitar for any young aspiring muso you should get Mum to layby it for Christmas for you today.

As an extra thought, for you pro muso's out there that don't presently have a Telecaster think about a pair of vintage Tonerider's and a Bigsby Tele kit. Very cool.

Thanks to the lads at KC's