“An unusually exceptional budget electric guitar”: Squier Paranormal Troy Van Leeuwen Telecaster XII review

What is it?

It might be Squier whose name is on the headstock of Troy Van Leeuwen’s Telecaster XII but there is some legit Fender Custom Shop DNA in this super-cool 12-string addition to the Paranormal Series.

You might have seen Van Leeuwen playing one of these Tele XIIs with Queens of the Stone Age. In June, he road-tested this Squier version on Jimmy Kimmel Live when he jammed onstage with Andrew Watt and Michael Stipe.

If you’ve caught one of QOTSA’s stadium dates over the summer, you will have seen the guitar that inspired it – and if you have seen it, then you surely would have remembered it, because who could forget seeing a 12-string Telecaster in Copper Age paint job with a four-ply tortoiseshell pickguard?

And that headstock is something else.

Van Leeuwen’s Custom Shop Telecaster XII was designed by Fender Master Builder Paul Waller, and has been in rotation for quite some time. It featured on the last four QOTSA records – including on a cover of Iggy Pop’s Sunday from their forthcoming studio album, Perfecth – and is the kind of electric guitar that Van Leeuwen reaches for when he needs something extra. His bandmate Dean Fertita has been known to borrow it, too.

“It does the twang sound I’ve always loved,” Van Leeuwen told Guitar World. “But adding 12 strings creates this extra lushness within that direct Tele-ness. It’s a cool but simple idea.

“I’ll break the 12-string out whenever I can because when you have three guitarists in one band, you have to find your spot. That guitar has a point that can always be heard in the mix.”

No kidding. It’s not like the first mass-produced electric guitar was ever lacking presence and trebly cut, but with an extra six strings – tuned an octave up on Low E to G, in unison on B and High E – this is something else entirely, quite possibly something Paranormal.

That word carries a little weight. No word of a lie, and by complete coincidence, the TV auto-played The X-Files pilot while I was tuning this Telecaster XII up. That’s a little spooky, right? T’is the season. Anyway, time to plug in. This guitar is one big vibe; it looks incredible, and I want to believe it sounds just as good. We all want to. It sure is a fox…

Specs

• Launch price: $599 | £509 | €599
• Made: China
• Type: 12-string electric guitar
• Body: Nyatoh
• Neck: Maple / C profile, bolt-on
• Fingerboard: Indian laurel
• Scale length: 25.5” / 648mm
• Nut/width: Micarta / 42.86mm
• Frets: 21, narrow tall
• Hardware: Vintage-style tuners with metal buttons, Telecaster 12-String Top-Load/String-Through bridge
• String spacing at bridge: 10mm
• Electrics: 2x Fender-designed Telecaster Alnico single-coil pickups, volume, tone, 3-way switching
• Weight: 8.2lb/3.74kg
• Options: Squier Paranormal Series includes the Troublemaker Telecaster Deluxe with Bigsby ($509), Baritone Jazzmaster HH ($479), Electric XI ($509), Jazzmaster XII ($429), Precision Bass Thinline SJ ($479), Stratocaster Deluxe ($479), Esquire Deluxe ($379). See Fender for web exclusives.
• Left-handed options: No
• Finishes: Copper Age
• Case: No
• Contact: Fender

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★★

In a world were caramelized maple is all the rage, it is reassuringly old-school to find a one-piece neck of almost bone-white maple on this test example, pristine but for a few tiny black knots. It’s fashioned into a fashionable C, affixed to the body via the usual four-bolt joint, to which a neck plate engraved with TVL’s signature is attached.

There’s no heel carve. There is no belly carve on the body. It very much feels like this could have been a blank that came off the Fender assembly line in the early ‘50s. Underneath that exquisite Copper Age finish you’ll find a slab of nyatoh.

Van Leeuwen was looking for affordability – this is, after all, Squier’s métier – so don’t expect this to be a 1:1 match of his Custom Shop model. We’ve got an Indian laurel fingerboard here. And yet, as rosewood stand-ins go, this is a pleasingly dark piece of wood. We’ve seen drier, less inspiring pieces of rosewood.

The 21 narrow-tall frets, again, speak to the vintage Telecaster vibe. There are the knurled metal knobs, the three-way slider switch, all controls mounted on a chrome plate as per the house style. This all looks and feels like some lost early ‘50s Fender rather than an explicitly 21st-century design.

Fender, or Squier, has never offered a Telecaster VII as a regular production line model before. Bruce Springsteen and Robin Zander of Cheap Trick have played custom Tele XIIs over the years, and there was a Fender Custom Shop run of them in the ‘90s. Now we have this, and it doesn’t even say Fender on the headstock.

What is worthy of note is the tidy little hybrid 12-string bridge. It’s fully adjustable, chrome to match the vintage-style tuners and buttons, and the fact it has the “hybrid” in its designation speaks to how you string it up. Six strings go through the ferrules on the back of the body, the other six strings are top-loaded, and there’s a heavy-duty string tree on the headstock to run them up to the tuners. The bridge and bridge single-coil sit in the metal plate in the time-honored Telecaster fashion.

Okay, a tuning update: Episode Three of The X-Files is now playing and the guitar is officially in tune [Guitar World would like to thank Boss pedals and the designer of the TU-3 for making this happen]. Seriously, though, this is par for the course with 12 strings, and out of the cardboard box, the Tele XII had a very tidy setup. With just a little relief in the neck, there was no need to tweak the truss rod, and on a 12-string, on which you’d have to slacken off four strings and tune up again, that’s a relief in the conventional sense of the word. Frets are neatly installed, too.

What else is there to note? Well, you get one finish option and that’s it. But given that we always associate Van Leeuwen with Oxblood, is it too far-fetched to imagine a second edition of this finished in Oxblood? Don’t rule it out when Fender currently stocks Van Leeuwen’s Jazzmaster in Copper Age and Oxblood finishes.

This is possibly inadmissible as evidence for review, but Van Leeuwen told me that when they delivered his Squier Tele XII, the courier accidentally ran it over in the driveway and it didn’t break. Make of that what you will, but Van Leeuwen is a straight arrow, and that story checks out. Whether six strings or 12, there is something about the Telecaster that makes it hard to kill.

Anyway, on with the show...

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★☆

The guitar is surely hard enough to play with six strings, let alone 12. There is a certain amount of masochism involved with playing a 12-string, particularly for those who harbor designs of playing fast single-note runs (or rather dual-note runs given that it is strung up in courses, or pairs).

Yes, the structural integrity of your finger calluses will be tested. Bending the strings is a Herculean labor. But as with everything on the guitar, the more you practice the easier it gets, and a 12-string rewards you in kind. These generic caveats apply to all 12-string guitars; it is the nature of the beast, and yet this remains an approachable instrument – an ideal first 12-string.

Squier has wisely given this a beginner-friendly C profile neck. You would surely not find a neck this svelte on a ‘50s Fender. The neck is satin smooth, too. This has a slightly wider nut than my ‘50s Style Baja Player Telecaster, which was one of the details Van Leeuwen discussed with Fender when designing the original Tele XII. The extra room is welcome.

Playing open chords on the Tele XII feels fine, and dare I say it, normal. The most Paranormal thing about all this is just how normal it feels after a while. The familiar 9.5” fingerboard radius feels of a piece with contemporary Squier/Fender’s most mainstream builds.

At a hair over 8lbs, the weight is bang average considering the extra hardware, and all that extra metal on the headstock doesn’t throw it off balance.

Players intending to bend the strings might wish to drop it down a whole step to D, when it comes a lot more pliable, but the move to 12 strings from a regular six is probably most alien to fingerstyle players. The fretting hand issues are a simple matter of dexterity, but the picking hand takes more getting used to, and might even necessitate the need for some fingerpicks – especially if you keep your nails shorter.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

There is something about our perception of the 12-string format that tends to flatten all guitars into one, as though their identity is subsumed by this extra run of strings.

We tend to look at them all as doing the same job – chime, jangle and all that jazz. It is as though you could pick up any 12-string off the wall and it can realize all your aspirations of sounding like Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Johnny Marr, and Peter Buck – that it’s the guitar you need to make Stairway to Heaven sound a bit more authentically 'Headley Grange'.

Well, of course this is all kinds of preposterous and yet it nonetheless begs the question; is a 12-string Telecaster still recognizable as a Fender Telecaster?

Yes and no. Yes, you will certainly find some of that signature Tele twang on the bridge pickup, and its more elastic twang at the neck. But no, with 12-strings, there’s something almost eerie about how this twang is rendered. There is something immediately psychedelic about the Tele XII, in how your playing brings out these micro-dissonances as the string bends unevenly under your finger.

This is the Telecaster doubled, an act of Telemaxxing, and the natural chorusing from this second set of complementary strings allows it to occupy more space in the mix. It’s not that the range of frequencies is greater; we’re still operating within the same Low-E-to-high-E framework.

There are simply more frequencies going on at any given time. Through a small tube combo and a little compression from the JHS Pulp N’ Peel, I could swear that open chords sound louder. Single notes sound fuller doubled. There is a harpsichord quality to single notes. Apply some fuzz and you might feel like someone has sneaked a Roger Mayer device on your pedalboard without you noticing.

Oftentimes, budget brands can be tempted to go for ceramic pickups. They typically run hot, are great fun for beginner players dialing in rock sounds, but they can be overly shrill. These Fender-designed Alnico single-coil pickups are a more grown-up proposition. There’s no lack of treble but there’s warmth there, too, and they clean up nicely.

For a circa 600-dollar electric guitar, the pots have a lovely action and taper. Rolling back the tone control makes that bridge pickup a superlative rhythm tone, especially when playing high-volume cleans. Kudos to Squier and Fender for this bridge design – and for the guitar-making bona fides on show here. Once brought up to pitch, the Tele XII held its tuning, even after digging in on those chords.

This being a Paranormal Series model, and the signature guitar of one of rock’s great tone seekers, there is an invitation to get creative. Once you’ve had your fun running through some 12-string standards (yes, Stairway to Heaven is a lot more convincing on this), you might well find that the 12-string is still a relatively unexplored instrument – and it’s one that takes pedals well.

Okay, so some chorus/vibrato from the trusty Boss CE-2 gave me vertigo but others might want to open up that can of swirl. With spring reverb and tape echo emulation, you can get a very different take on formative rock ’n’ roll electric guitar sounds, and what you lose in percussive definition you gain in resonance, as though the guitar comes with its own accompaniment.

And there’s something undeniably feral about high-gain sounds with a single-coil 12-string. With both pickups engaged, that’s a serious rock tone, but at the bridge pickup, its skronky duality plays really well for punk sounds. It’s like Van Leeuwen says, this does something that other guitars just can’t do, and every player could use an instrument like that. And if you want chime, play it clean on the neck pickup, but remember, that stuff’s for the Byrds.

Verdict

The Telecaster XII isn’t the only 12-string in the current Squier Paranormal lineup. There is a Jazzmaster, and it too has the hybrid top-loader/string-through-body bridge plus the option of Lake Placid Blue or Olympic White finishes. These offset guitars are also a little cheaper, and so if you are for a 12-string electric under $500, you have options.

But this is most certainly the only 12-string Tele in town. It’s the only Tele you’ll find in Copper Age. And it might also be the skeleton key you’ve been looking for to unlock the tones heard on Queens of the Stone Age jams like I Appear Missing and My God Is the Sun. Better still, it might be just what you need to create some tone mysteries of your own.

As with the best Squier designs, this is also a credible candidate for modding. You could swap out the bridge single-coil for a stacked humbucker. It would also be intriguing to take the octave-up strings off the bottom three strings and play this as a nine-string, using the double strings as a means of adding texture to your leads. Radical? Absolutely. But this is the Paranormal series. Forget business as usual, this was made to get weird.

Guitar World verdict: What’s really weird is that a 12-string Tele is considered weird at all. Double the twang at half the price, Troy Van Leeuwen’s Telecaster XII is an unusually exceptional budget electric that dares adventurous players to rewrite the 12-string rulebook. Don’t just let it chime. This could be a powerful tool for sonic reinvention.

Also try

Squier Paranormal Jazzmaster XII
$429 | £429 | €479

The obvious alternative would be to try this offset sibling. It has a poplar body, Fender-designed Alnico pickups, classic finish options, and... Well, Leeuwen likes Jazzmasters, too

Danelectro Dan O. Cool 12-string
$649 | £699 | €729

Danelectro do all kinds of cool electric 12-strings but with an angled P-90 style neck pickup and splittable double-lipstick humbucker, the Dan O Cool covers so many more tones.

Gretsch Electromatic G5422G-12 Hollowbody
$999 | £899 | €1,039

We've moved up a price bracket but if you are looking for a great value 12-string with a bit of mojo, this Electromatic is a superb option.

Hands-on videos

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