Teisco Top Twenty 1965

1960s Teisco Top Twenty in super clean shape with no wear or hits. All original condition, including the vibrato arm, which is pretty rare on these guitars!

 If you're a fan of The Cure, you should know this is the model with Robert Smith started the band with and still has one of these single coil pickups in the middle of his jazzmaster.

Teisco (テスコ) was a Japanese manufacturer of affordable musical instruments from 1948 until 1969, when the brand was acquired by Kawai Musical Instruments Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (河合楽器製作所; Kawai Gakki Seisakusho). The company produced guitars as well as keyboard instruments, microphones, amplifiers and even drums. Teisco products were widely exported to the United States and the United Kingdom

Teisco guitars were imported to the United States and UK since 1959 or early 1960, and then re-badged as "Teisco Del Rey" after 1964. Teisco guitars were also imported under several brand names including Silvertone, Kent, Beltone, Duke, Encore, Heit Deluxe, Hy Lo , Jedson, Kimberly, Kingston, Lyle, Norma, Tulio and World Teisco. Likewise, they were imported in the U.K under such labels as Arbiter, Sonatone, Audition, Kay and Top Twenty. These brands were typically sold in large department stores, including Sears, Montgomery Ward, Woolworth (US), and Woolworth's (UK).

In the early 1960s Teisco products became increasingly unique. Teisco guitars became notable for unusual body shapes, such as the May Queen design resembling an artist's palette, or other unusual features such as having four pickups (most guitars have two or three). The vast amount of controls; typically an individual switch for each pickup, plus a tone or phase-cancellation switch, along with as many as five tone and volume knobs gave a wide variety of sounds yet were easily switched while playing.

From 1948 to the early 1960s Teisco products often, like many Japanese products of the period, shared several designs with American and Western European products of the time including the Swedish brand Hagström or the Italian brand EKO.