Antoria 70s Teles ?

PeteC

Hi 

does anyone here own a 70s Antoria Tele?     I had one as my first “real” guitar and in hindsight it was a really good quality Tele.  Interested to know if anyone has one and what you think of it ?      

Mine was a cream body with a maple board.  It played extremely well. 

I have been looking around for another to buy for sentimental reasons but not found one yet.  

cheers 
Pete 

Edit - sorted the Antoria typo! 

JezWynd

Do you mean Antoria? My first electric was an Antoria LP Studio. Very good guitar in hindsight; good neck, exceptional action, powerful pickups, good tuners etc. though very heavy. I had no concept of electric guitar playing at the time, having self taught via chord charts in the Bob Dylan Songbook on a Fender F25. I don’t often see old Antorias offered for sale. Good luck in your search.

Henrytwang

Antoria guitars were one of the better 1970s Japanese copy brands , usually well made from quality materials.

merlin

Antoria made some excellent instruments and spectacular copies back then. I currently have an Antoria "Hummingbird" that's a fine instrument. Too big for me as I prefer a smaller bodied acoustic nowadays but a lovely thing nonetheless. I used to own an Antoria ES-175 type guitar which was made in the FujiGen plant. It was amazing, ought to have kept it but there you go....

mark123

I tried a couple years ago 
they were dogs
Your money is best spent on a thommann te52 or a classic vibe 

sentiment is a strange thing 

my first guitar was a satellite les paul bolt on with a action like a cheese grater

i wont be hunting one of them down 

ICBM

I had an Antoria Tele Thinline copy for a while - I bought it from a junk shop because it had an aftermarket humbucker fitted, which I had a suspicion was an old Gibson just by looking at it, and the guitar was something like £30. It was! But sadly not a PAF .

It was actually a pretty good guitar - I eventually replaced the pickup with something cheap and sold it on, but I do remember it and miss it more than a lot of the junk-shop guitars I owned briefly.

A friend had an Antoria Les Paul copy with the Super 70 pickups too, that was a really good guitar. I can't remember what he did with it in the end.

JayGee

You’re in the era where the Antoria, and Ibanez catalogues were pretty much interchangeable (with quite a few models also showing up under CSL branding) and the guitars were pretty much the same product, sourced from the same factories with the appropriate brand applied. 

Some were better than others, some being really, really good and very few of them being outright bad. The nicer stuff seemed to be more likely to show up with Ibanez branding, with the less nice being more likely to carry Antoria branding (presumably reflecting the markets the importers were selling into) but this was by no means an absolute. CSLs (like the Les Paul Custom-a-like I bought in 1976 and still own) spanned pretty much the full range. All of them were nicer than anything I’ve seen from the other big “copy” brands active at the time like Columbus, CMI, and Grant although there are accounts I’ve seen suggesting that there were some outliers in those brands which could match what in the circles I moved in at the time regarded as the “premium” Japanese copy brands.

Funkfingers

Judge each guitar on its merits. (Admittedly, difficult under Coronavirus lockdown.)

A friend of mine has an ancient MIJ Höhner T type guitar. Judging by the bottoms of the routs, it was originally white. Now, it is two waffur theen pale veneers over a spread of mahogany, rubbed over in beeswax. Other modifications included a neck position humbucker with a badly spliced output cable. This turned out to be an early DiMarzio P.A.F. I converted its output cable to allow the coil splitting and phase reversal that the owner wanted. 

prowla

I think we should separate the nostalgia for what we once had from the quality of the instruments.

Those 70s copies were not really very good and current Squiers and suchlike blow them out of the water.

I have to say I do have a couple of Teiscos, which are absolute toot, but they are fun.

None of those Teisco, Columbus, Grant, Jedson, Antoria, Avon, etc. are up to much; they were made as budget/beginner/school band instruments.

At some point Tokai and one or two other brands started going a bit up-market, which kicked off the whole lawsuit thing. (I have a Tokai Silver Star rebuild to do; it's probably on a par with a Fender MIM Strat.)

If you're looking at spending hundreds, then real Gibsons can be had around the £300 mark, which will give you something better than those copies.