The Teye Gypsy Queen 4xSC features:
- select Spanish Cedar body
- select Maple neck
- 4x Lollar Strat pick-ups
- Teye proprietary MOJO-electronics (for each version Teye has developed and fine-tuned a custom MOJO-circuit)
- Grover mini-tuners
- Hipshot vibrato tailpiece
Teye says: “I’m a big fan of Jimi Hendrix, of what he stood for, of his beautiful music and of course his breath-taking guitar playing. And I’ve always wondered why the Jimi-impersonators always play a regular Strat. Jimi himself favored a whole bunch of guitars, recorded the iconic ‘Hey Joe’ on Noel’s Telecaster, and used Flying V’s and an SG Custom for the thicker sounds. Nonetheless, of course his main axe was always a flipped-over Strat, and he got the biggest tone out of that Strat that you can imagine.
Jimi could have gotten any number of Left Handed Strats from the Fender factory for free, if he had so chosen. He opted for the so-called ‘CBS’ version, Right Handed, and swapped the nut around and re-strung them and ‘flipped them over’ to be his main stage guitars.
The Strat is by no means a symmetrical guitar. When you flip it over and re-string it, you are dealing with a radically different beast. Several half-way flipped-over normal Strats have been marketed over the years, with disappointing results. So I made one for myself, a full-blown LH Strat, and flipped it over, to see how it would compare. The TONE was so magical that I dubbed it the Astro-Caster, as backwards-for-Strat and in hommage to that great Jimi song ‘Astro Man’ (yeah check out the lyrics to that one…)
When you look at any grand-piano, you’ll notice that the low strings are long, and the high strings are short. Look at any jazz guitar, and the tailpieces tend to have the low strings long, and the high strings short, just like the corresponding wave lengths. To this day I wonder why on average six-a-side headstocks the high strings are long and the low strings are short…
Also, on the Fender style bridge pickups, the high strings sound like ice picks, because of the slant of these pickups. When you reverse the slant, the high strings mellow out while the low strings gain definition.
