Can't decide between a Tele and a Strat? Get both with the Joe Doe Punkaster

It’s an age-old question: Tele or Strat?

Thanks to Vintage's Joe Doe range of electric guitars, the answer can now be 'both.'

Meet the Punkaster, a new limited model that mashes together Tele- and Strat-style body shapes into a unique – and highly affordable – design.

The model sports an alder body, hard rock maple neck with a vintage “soft-C” profile and a hard rock maple fingerboard with 22 medium profile frets.

Other features include a Wilkinson WVC Vibrato bridge, 43mm graphite nut, a vintage “Joe Doe” Punkaster headstock, mismatched tuners and a half-and-half pickguard.

Pickups, meanwhile, are a trio of Joe Doe designed single coils, controlled by master volume and master tone knobs and a five-way selector switch.

Like all guitars in the Joe Doe range, the Punkaster comes with its own unique, fictional backstory, which involves it having been “owned, destroyed and hastily reconstructed” by its owner, Brandon Hicks, of fake New York City punk act FistMeetsFace – whose performances would include “a smashed guitar, a puddle of blood and, following the after-show party, another broken heart.”

To bolster that story, the Punkaster’s neck comes with a series of signatures on the back, including “contact details for emergency lawyers and phone numbers for old girlfriends.”

The fingerboard, meanwhile, sports “custom mismatched position markers and Kate’s cell phone number. She runs a music products company now, has twin boys and a plumber for a husband. To think, back in the day, she used to scale the PA system to dive into the crowd at Brandon’s gigs.”

The Punkaster is being produced in a limited run of 100, and is available for £599, or approx. $765.

For more information, head to JHS.com.