2008 - Teisco/EKO Kadet/Bison (1960's Made in Japan)

Teisco/Kay/Segova/EKO... who knows?

EKO/Teisco Kadet

I got this guitar a couple of years ago from a local guy who was selling on ebay. My intent was to buy a crappy guitar and modifiy it with some crazy on board effects and a sustainer setup. But once I got it home I just couldn't bring myself to do anything of the sort.

The body obviously has a dodgy spray paint re-finish(you can see the paint run in spots. Apparently the whole thing is made of laminate. You might recall the horror I experienced when my first guitar was made of plywood. Well the thing about this guitar is, that it sounds really good!
The neck is laminate too. You can see the layers through the finish. At first I thought it was some weird rippled wood (my house has poor lighting). The pickups only measure about 4.7 to 5.6kohms so they're pretty low output. That's no problem if you have a booster handy.

The low output of the pickups match the dodgy input impedance of my Sovtek Bigmuff and is the only one of my guitars to sound any good with that fuzz pedal. So bonus points there!

The tremolo is a simple stamped steel affair that is just wonderful to play with. You can get some really wild vibrato happening and the guitar stays in tune 75% of the time.

I had some trouble Identifying the guitar as there's no branding on it, just Made in japan stamped on the neck plate. The body is the same shape as a Sekova Bison, and there is the same shape out the with the brand name Kay on them. I'd always suspected it to be a Teisco, but only recently confirmed via the Tym Guitars website(see gray guitar) that its either a Teisco or Eko.


The switches along the top control the pickup combination and the switch on the bottom is for bass cut. There are three volume controls and one tone control.  If you find one, at least give it a go, expecially through an amp with a bit of reverb, its surf-tastic!