Grote Electric Guitar Semi-Hollow Body Single F-Hole Printed Tele Style Guitar Full-Size Basswood with Canadian Maple neck Chrome Hardware

Background: Experienced player just getting back into the guitar game after 15 years. I have experience with Strats, Les Pauls, Kramers, Martins, Ibanezzezsez, . I have always done all of my own work on my guitars, including setup, repairs, finishing, etc., including a partscaster that I built from scratch this summer. I miss some of the stuff I sold, like my '69 Thinline Reissue. Loved that guitar and always regretted selling it. When I saw this, I had to have it. And for less than $125, it seemed like a low-risk proposition. First impressions. I must say, when I got it out of the box and unwrapped it, I was stunned with the way it looked. It is one handsome looking guitar and seems like it should be way more expensive than it is. The "flaming" is definitely printed, but looks good from 2-3 feet away. The hardware is shiny and polished. Fret edges required no filing. Frets themselves were a little rough, but just playing it made that much better. The binding is the approprate cream color (just that little touch does so much for the guitar). A yellower, more vintage looking finish on the neck would make it look all that much better, but it's still not bad. Some details aren't quite as good. The binding around the neck has a little roughness to it. The volume and tone knobs look great from straight on, but when you rotate them through their travel, you can see lots of variation in the knurling, almost as if there was some sort of casting error. It's not obvious from the front, however. Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the surface flaw in the front of the guitar. Why the front? Why couldn't this be on the back? LOL. The pics show it. It's not huge, but it's there, and I first noticed it when I set the guitar up vertically and walked back from it. And yes, it can be seen from a distance, even though it's not immediately obvious. See the pics to get an idea. It doesn't look like a dent that was gotten in transit...no cracking of the wood or finish. Just a dent, which looks like some sort of slight warpage in the wood. You tend to forget that when you fire it up for the first time and hear that sound, though. Kick that switch down to the bridge position, roll the tone back a little, and you're in Tele heaven. Pull that switch up, and it's Jazz Night at the Birdland. From a pure "quality of sound" standpoint, it takes me right back to my Thinline. This thing is SUCH a "tone dog". But then, you start playing chords. And that's when the negatives start creeping back in. Intonation from the factory was way off. So, I started to set it up. For the record, I've never had issues intonating a guitar. This one looked to be much the same. Everything, according to my tuner (the same one that I used to set up my last guitar with no problem) was set correctly when I was finished. But, I simply could not get the thing to sound correct. All strings showing the same note for harmonic octave and fretted at the 12th. Play a D, sounds great. Play a C, sounds like it I never tuned it. Go back and check, everything looks right. Simply can't get a good intonation. Some chords ring true, some sound like hot garbage. It's bad. Further, I noticed that I had to have my amp a little more cranked than I did with my other guitar. The pickups simply aren't hot, and when I started getting to the volume I wanted, the sound started breaking up pretty significantly. Not that it sounded bad, mind you...its just hard to keep it clean because of the low output. As far as playability is concerned, it's not bad at all. I'll say it's probably as easy or even easier than my Strat (of course, my strat has 10's on it and this one has what appear to be 9's). I do have a bit of fret buzz on the low E, not audible through the amp when playing, so no biggie. The neck did not have enough relief in it, so I loosened the truss rod in hopes that the strings would pull some relief in the neck, but the truss rod was already very loose, and the neck didn't seem to move in 24 hours. Its almost like they tried to back the truss rod all the way out from the factory to get the neck back in line, because the adjustment I made didn't feel like it did anything. Volume, tone, and pickup switching all work smoothly with no static. This guitar doesn't hum like my Strat does, either. Nice. Hardware leaves something to be desired. The saddles in particular are poorly executed. I noticed that the high E string had a buzzy/ringy sound and no sustain. I looked along the entire path of the string. I finally found that, after the string comes out of the body and before it crosses the saddle, it was making contact with the spring that locates the saddle. It was negatively affecting the sound of that string and killing the sustain of it. Thought of how to fix it, and I finally made a "spring stop" out of a tiny metal plate and threaded it onto the saddle screw. The spring rests against that instead of the back of the saddle, leaving it out of the way of the string, yet still able to hold pressure against the saddle screw (see pic). Yes, it's a kludge, but it got the spring out of the way and now the high E rings clear, plus it can be set back to stock in five minutes. But, the saddles and/or bridge really need to go if you want to make this thing a serious player. More $$$. As others have said, the tuners seem a bit slippy. In some cases, they seem to turn with the proper resistance, and in some cases, they seem really light. As of right now, the guitar does go out of tune occasionally. More often than I'd like, to be honest. When you turn the tuners, you can hear the string sticking in the nut, which is often a cause of a guitar that goes out of tune frequently. Lubing the nut (and the bridge, and every other contact point of the strings) got rid of the sticking sound, but didn't fix the guitar's propensity to go out of tune. Really needs new tuners to be right. Cha-ching. There goes that cash register again. The concept of a cheap guitar loses it's appeal when you have to spend $$$ to make it a player. And I'm not sure that throwing money at it would necessarily fix the intonation problem. As much as I want to dislike this guitar, I can't. I have a soft spot for Teles generally and Thinlines in particular. So, it broke my heart to finally resign myself to the fact that I just needed to cut my losses and return it. I really wanted to like it...I mean, the idea of a budget Thinline is fantastic. And I'm not averse to doing a little work in the setup of it, but this seemed to go beyond that. Maybe I just got a bad one. Either way, I'm not going to risk it for a second time. And since so many others had good luck with it, I'll rate it three stars instead of two or one.

The packaging kinda sucked. I'm a little surprised it survived the trip. Was a regular cardboard guitar box, but just had loose scraps of styrofoam jammed into the box next to the guitar. That was the manufacturers packing. Amazon stuck that into box big enough I could ship myself in it, and... nothing else. Just a cubic yard of air. Dunno what that's about. Otherwise. I dig it. Might need a setup. Action is maybe a little high I think. Intonation between 0/12 is SPOT on, which is groovy. Tuned right up, and has stayed there as well as any other guitar. The electronics seem mostly pretty good. The sound is, to my ears, much better than my other cheap tele, by a lot. It's every bit as pretty as the pictures. Some folks might not like the neck, it's either bare wood, or a VERY light finish on it. I kinda prefer that; I always feel like heavy lacquers seem 'sticky'. The body is just a little smaller than my other cheap tele, and it's notably lighter. The nut on the output jack fell off after an hour, but... I've never had a guitar that the darn thing didn't wiggle loose on so it didn't bug me much. The bridge is 6 barrels, and I don't think I like it. I will probably replace it with an aftermarket one with the more traditional saddles I'm used to. Pretty sure that issue's more in my head than actually with the guitar. I've only had it for 24 hours, so I still gotta give it a few months for the 'new and shiny' to wear off, but... this cheap little guitar is fighting real REAL hard to be one of my favorites.

I recently bought a Grote 335 Style guitar, they call it "Full Sized, Semi Hollow Guitar" Clever?! And I love it. It's easily as good as the Epiphone 335 that is currently selling for more than three times as much as the Grote. So I thought their Tele Thinline model might be decent. No great, just decent. Not Even close!!! The body and the neck on this guitar are pretty decent but absolutely nothing else is. The bridge is just terrible. The strings rub against the springs you would use to adjust the saddle length. It causes the strings to buzz and no sustain. Of course I expected to change the strings. Now I'm sorry I wasted a good set of strings. The design of the bridge is such that it's much longer than a traditional Tele bridge. So replacing it would leave holes where this one is attached. But it gets worse. The scale length is 25 and 7/8 inches. Almost a half an inch out of spec. And that's just the bridge. The pickups - awful. The bridge pickup is very hot - 19.6 ohms and not a pleasing sound at all. The neck pickup has no tone whatsoever. It measures 5.9 ohms. Obviously, these pickups won't play well together. Tuners? Well not awful but a little sloppy. And like all chinese Fender style guitars the string trees don't give you proper angle over the nut. A fairly easy fix and I would do it if there was any reason to try and save this disaster of a guitar. So after trashing this guitar in this review, have to say that are a couple of things I like. The body. I thought THAT was going to be the problem. Printed paper veneer had to be awful, but in real life it looks pretty good. And the body is light. There's also a nice rounded neck plate. The finish is excellent except... They did a very nice job with the binding on the top but the f-holes are not finished. A small problem except as it is you can see that the top is plywood. The neck. I really like the neck!!! Pretty fat, 50s style neck. Satin finish or maybe just the minimum amount of poly they could put on the neck. Still it feels good. The frets are pretty good. Not sharp edges and they were polished enough so that there's no scratchiness. So, I gues I had a lot of expectations for a guitar that cost $105.00 but the $185 335 was so could it had raised my expectations. I was hoping it might be a guitar that I could do minor mods and have a decent guitar, but as it is it would take too much money to get it up to speed. but I'm going to keep the neck and stick it on some other guitar.

love it

As the saying goes. If it's to good to be true. I've had the neck off mine now about 3 times. The neck does not sit flush in the route. It angles up at about 3 to 4*. Not good at all. Both Glarry guitars for my kids had this issue. Making me think it's built by the same factory. But the body I have sanded flat and the neck also is sitting to tall at the joint as well. I'm not a fan of the bridge and feel I'm going to pull the bridge and drill it to install a 3 saddle set up. Too much buzzing from the 6 saddles, and I replaced them. The problem is most likely caused by saddle springs touching the strings. It's loud because the bridge is not grounded. It is what it is I guess. Not impressed. Expensive fire wood. Think I'll get a IYV next time.