Tele Special: James Trussart & Swope

To celebrate our trip to Nashville this week for the Summer NAMM show, we decided to take a look at our current stock of Tele-style electric guitars from James Trussart and Chris Swope.

Chris Swope

Kansas-based Chris Swope has taken the familiar Telecaster design and fitted it with his own design of pickup. The MG features an uncontoured, two-piece, centre-seam Ash body with a Maple neck and rosewood fingerboard, with a pair of Chris's own MG single-coil pickups, offering a great blend of the spank you would expect in the bridge pickup with a nice warmth in the neck pickup.

The MG also features a push/pull switch on the tone control to put the pickups into series to create a creamy humbucker!

Chris's GTO model has a more rounded, Strat-like body contour, but with the well-loved single cutaway. This GTO also features its own dedicated set of pickups, this time a pair of lap-steel inspired single coils with a hotter output and fuller mid-range, maintaining the clarity that Swope guitars are known for.

Chris's guitars have found their way into the hands of the likes of The Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood. Find out more in our Talking Guitar interview with Chris Swope here.

James Trussart

James Trussart's guitars need no introduction. Using steel as a primary material, James's guitars feature fully hollow steel bodies with gorgeous stained Maple necks. The steel helps to add more clarity and resonance to the Tele design, and it makes the guitars feel incredibly alive.

Each guitar is individually aged and finished with custom scratchplates ranging from engraved snakeskin to engraved roses.

James Trussart Deluxe SteelCaster Bigsby - Ocean Blue on Cream Roses - £4,950

James Trussart Deluxe SteelCaster, Cream on Red Roses - £4,450

James Trussart Deluxe SteelCaster, Sea Foam Green on Cream Paisley - £4,450

To find out more about these or any of our other guitars, get in touch by calling +44 (0) 207 835 5597 or emailing us at hello@thenorthamericanguitar.com.