In June 2026, Troy Van Leeuwen walked onto the Jimmy Kimmel Live! stage, stood next to Michael Stipe, and played a guitar nobody in the audience could buy yet. It was a 12-string Telecaster in a copper finish, and for a few weeks it existed only as a rumor and a grainy screen grab. In September it landed on shelves as the Squier Paranormal Troy Van Leeuwen Telecaster XII, and the price tag is the part worth talking about: $599.99.
That number is the whole story. The signature name and the artist pedigree are real, but the genuinely unusual thing here is a factory-fresh electric 12-string that costs less than a single humbucker upgrade on a boutique guitar. For roughly sixty years, the electric 12-string has been either a vintage collector’s item or a boutique splurge. Squier just quietly changed that math.
What Squier actually built
The spec sheet reads like a deliberately honest budget build, not a corner-cutting one. The body is nyatoh, an affordable mahogany substitute that Squier and Sire have both leaned on lately. The bolt-on maple neck carries a C profile, a 25.5-inch scale, and an Indian laurel fingerboard. Two Fender-designed alnico single-coil pickups sit under a top-load/string-through bridge built specifically for twelve strings, which is a bigger deal than it sounds: restringing a 12-string is a chore, and a bridge that feeds strings from the top rather than only through the body makes the job faster and helps the tuning settle.
The finish is called Copper Age, and it is not a random choice. It matches Van Leeuwen’s first Fender signature, the Troy Van Leeuwen Jazzmaster, which shipped in the same coppery colorway. This Telecaster XII is his second Fender signature, and Squier’s first-ever artist model under the Paranormal banner, the line the company reserves for oddball body styles and reissued curiosities.
The blueprint was not a spec sheet at all. It was Van Leeuwen’s own Paul Waller Custom Shop Masterbuilt 12-string Telecaster, a one-off with a neck modeled on the Burns Double Six he had played for fourteen years. “When creating my second signature with Fender, I wanted an instrument at an affordable price point that could inspire anyone who’s ever been curious about playing a 12-string,” Van Leeuwen told MusicRadar. Fender’s chief product officer for guitar, Justin Norvell, framed the aesthetic side: “Troy has always approached the guitar differently. He hears texture, harmony and space in a way that’s uniquely his own,” he told Premier Guitar.
Why a cheap 12-string is a bigger deal than the signature
To understand why $599 is the headline, you have to know why 12-string electrics almost never get cheap.
The instrument’s whole identity was minted in 1964 and 1965. George Harrison got an early Rickenbacker 360/12, played it through A Hard Day’s Night, and the chiming intro to “Ticket to Ride” turned that shimmering, doubled-string jangle into the defining sound of folk rock. Watching the demand explode, Fender rushed out its own answer, the Fender Electric XII, in June 1965. It was the last guitar Leo Fender designed before CBS bought the company, it wore a dramatic “hockey stick” headstock, and Jimmy Page ended up tracking parts of the early Led Zeppelin records on one.
Here is the twist history usually skips: the Electric XII flopped. It was expensive, the folk-rock craze cooled fast, and Fender built most of them in just 1965 and 1966 before winding the model down by 1970. The 12-string electric never became a workhorse. It became a specialty tool, and specialty tools stay expensive because nobody makes them in volume. That pattern held for decades. A new Rickenbacker 360/12 runs from roughly $2,299 upward, and even the honorable budget outlier, the Danelectro 12-string at around $549, sounds like a Danelectro rather than a proper solidbody electric.
So a Squier at $599 with real single-coils and a Tele platform is not just another signature model. It slots into a gap the industry has left open since the Johnson administration. A Gretsch G5422 12-string sits somewhere in the $500 to $1,000 band, but for a curious guitarist who wants to find out whether the jangle belongs in their music before spending rent money, $599 is the first genuinely low-stakes door into the format.
The value math, and where it actually lands
Line the options up and the Squier’s position is obvious. If you want the canonical jangle, the Rickenbacker is the real thing and it costs four to five times as much. If you want cheap and characterful, the Danelectro gets you in the door for about fifty dollars less but with lipstick pickups and a Masonite body that commit you to one very specific sound. The Squier splits the difference: a familiar solidbody feel, Tele single-coils that stay articulate in a busy mix, and a price that lets you treat a 12-string as an experiment rather than an investment.
That “heard in the mix” quality is the point of Van Leeuwen’s whole approach. In Queens of the Stone Age, A Perfect Circle, Failure, Gone Is Gone and The Armed, his job has rarely been the lead line. It has been the texture underneath it, the layer you feel before you notice. A 12-string electric with cutting single-coils is exactly that instrument: it thickens a rhythm part without stepping on the vocal, and it adds a second guitarist’s worth of shimmer to a three-piece.
Who should actually buy one, and what you give up at this price
Be clear-eyed about the tradeoffs. Nyatoh is not Honduran mahogany, an Indian laurel board is not rosewood, and Fender-designed pickups are not the Custom Shop set in Van Leeuwen’s original. A 12-string also doubles your tuning headaches: twelve strings pull harder on the neck, they go out of tune with each other in ways a six-string never will, and a beginner who struggles to keep a standard guitar in tune will find this frustrating. The top-load bridge helps, but physics is physics.
This guitar makes sense for two players. The first is the working rhythm guitarist or home recordist who has wanted that Byrds/R.E.M./QOTSA shimmer as an occasional color and could never justify a Rickenbacker for a part that shows up on two songs. The second is the curious intermediate player who wants to learn whether a 12-string fits their writing at all, and would rather find out for $599 than $2,500. If you are shopping for your only electric, or you are brand new, a standard six-string like a Squier or a budget Telecaster-style guitar is the smarter first purchase, in the same way the Harley Benton Aged Series makes more sense as a cheap workhorse than as a first-ever instrument.
Squier did not reinvent the electric 12-string. It did something rarer: it made one that a normal person can afford to be curious about. Sixty years after Leo Fender’s flop, that might be the more useful contribution.