LeftyBassist.com

Anyone here have any experience with Squier's Affinity line? Specifically their Telecaster? There's a lefty here locally at a shop and it feels great and seems nice fit & finish wise. I have not plugged it in yet. At $179 it's really a no brainer, but I just wanted to see if any of you have played around with these guitars. I imagine it'll be the usual.. decent, but crappy hardware & electronics.

So anyway, just wanted to know your thoughts. I'm looking to add a token electric guitar to my stable for dirt cheap.

Your impression is dead on. It'll make a great token.

Haha. Excellent.

Can't speak for the Affinity, but I played the Squire Classic Vibe Tele (different guitar?) at NAMM this year and was sufficiently blown away. My #1 main guitar is my Fender 1999 '52 RI MIA Tele, which go for about $1999 new now (ridiculous, IMO, considering you could get one new for about $1199 about 5 years ago). But I digress. The Squire came pretty DAMN close to my '52 RI in both looks and sound. Body's pine, the pots did feel a bit flimsy and the neck profile's not as beefy as the '52 (which I prefer). I've seriously been considering picking one up to mod and have as a backup.

At any rate, it looks like the going rate everywhere for an Affinity is $179, so your local shop isn't exactly a bargain. If you liked it, then by all means pick it up, but you can probably get it cheaper if you look around. But if it were me I'd be looking for a good price on the Classic Vibe.

Probably gonna grab it. It's local here in town.

Correct, the Affinity will do the job but the Classic Vibe ( I tried the 2 Strats) are fantastic instruments.

Cool. Well there's a remote chance I will gig on guitar. So I just want something decent to tinker on. Which leads me to getting a decent practice amp. Any thoughts there?

I assume you want to go cheap on the practice amp? I personally love the Roland Cube amps. Tons of features and a lot of fun.

Yeah strangely enough I'm thinking beginner setup but with attention to the best possible tone for the buck. It's weird to think beginner after having played bass for 25 years

If you gig with a PA, the quality of the amplifier is more important than the quality of the guitar (unlike bass where you often use a DI and your amp is mainly for monitoring). For guitar, I am partial to tube amps (otherwise I find the sound being too harsh an unpleasant usually). It is tough to find something decent for a good price. A 30W tube will work in most situations.

you can start by just plugging it into a bass amp. get a distortion pedal if you're into that.
the problem with guitar amps is that small amps are either very crappy of very very expansive.

I recently tried this with a gk500 and ampeg PF210, for distortion I used a boss BR recording unit.
The problem I had is while it sounded ok at home, it had no prejection at all at a band jam

See below.... couldn't delete this post....

And this is true because a bass amp/cab just can't deliver all of the upper register/frequencies a guitar puts out, especially in a club setting... been there, tried that....

I don't know about a clean sound, but I used to play guitar in hard-core band and for years my set-up was a mesa-boogie twin-v straight into a laney rbw300. I liked that sound so much I kept using it parallel to my later acquired tube head.
but then again it was brutal as fuck.

I'd throw a second for the Roland Cube amps, the 40 or 80 will do very well (widest selection of quality tone). The Cube80 really pulls ahead of the rest with it's Fender Deluxe based channel.

I also really like the new Orange Micro-Terror amps, it's a little 20watt class-D amp with a single 12AX7 in the pre-amp, you can throw it through a little 1x8 cab they make for it, and it can power anything all the way up to a 4x12. And it's only around $150.