Guitars... what you've got / what you want

The tone knob is your friend on a Telecaster. That said, many humbucker guitars don't need them and sound better without them in the circuit.

UMS please keep this thread updated when you get an install those pickups! i love the concept of doing a pickup consult and it sounds like the guy is really into treating people right. i would be very interested in working with him on replacement pickups for my squier venus if you're satisfied.

neck pickup, my dude. that's what it's there for: bitey without being ear-stabby

if it made any earthly sense to rip out the bridge pickup and go neck-only, I would

if it made any earthly sense to rip out the bridge pickup and go neck-only, I would

In general, I'd say with most guitars, Telecasters even more than others, depends on what type of guitar you got. Ashtray bridge? Swamp ash or Alder? Maple neck or rosewood. Is the guitar really light?

Lots of lower end Telecasters also have pickups that have ceramic magnets and not always the best pots and caps for sound. Sometimes if the pickups are not bad, you can really change the sound with that part of the wiring first.

There are boodles of options out there. I think the Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound telecaster pickups are pretty good and not crazy expensive. Obviously you can go from there into much more high end custom made things.

The guys I know around here that build guitars for a living tend to favor using Fralin's pickups in Telecasters, but they are hand made and are not cheap.

matttkkkk that is intriguing, tell me more. Is it a Musicmaster?

Love the pickup, don't love that glitchy saddle

Yeah that's a 78 MM, bought very cheap before they went nuts. The saddles are fine, I use wound G strings so it was a set-and-forget kinda thing. Neck is hilariously chunky so I love it.
https://i.imgur.com/nGp9oEe.jpg
Agree with earlnash, tobo73 it kind of depends on what bridge pickup you have - e.g. if it's a ceramic type one then something like an Alnico II Pro from SD might take the harshness out. Or you could go for a humbucker-in-single thing like a Lil 59 or similar. Or swap the bridge plate and go crazy, Charlie Christian, PAF, whatever!
ooh - these guys do a CC as a drop-in for Tele bridge - http://www.dreamsongspickups.com/en/content/charlie-christian-tele-bridge

My Telecaster has a K-Line Signature pickup set - I actually only use the bridge, if I wanted to put some effort in I'd take out the neck and rewire it to be an Esquire, I don't seem to like Telecaster neck pickups much. The K-Line bridge is full and not too bright.

Most online demos of them are in his guitars but he sells sets for a reasonable price IIRC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGe1x_5-Bmw

https://k-lineguitars.com/store/Signature-T-Tele%C2%AE-Set-p148161198

very cool, mat3k4.

re pickups, I have generally been fine with the stock pickups in my various Teles. For my main Strat I changed to Samarium Cobalt Noiseless a while back and have never wanted anything else. That is my sound now.

In general, I'd say with most guitars, Telecasters even more than others, depends on what type of guitar you got. Ashtray bridge? Swamp ash or Alder? Maple neck or rosewood. Is the guitar really light?

Lots of lower end Telecasters also have pickups that have ceramic magnets and not always the best pots and caps for sound. Sometimes if the pickups are not bad, you can really change the sound with that part of the wiring first.

There are boodles of options out there. I think the Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound telecaster pickups are pretty good and not crazy expensive. Obviously you can go from there into much more high end custom made things.

The guys I know around here that build guitars for a living tend to favor using Fralin's pickups in Telecasters, but they are hand made and are not cheap.

― earlnash, Friday, 11 February 2022 02:17 (one hour ago) link

It's an '84 MIJ Tele, alder body, rosewood neck, no ashtray. The thing is, I like the twangy sound of a tele bridge pickup, at least when I hear other people play. Maybe I'm not used to hearing it up close. It also sounded better through the tweed-style amp I played it through in the store, and probably in their more deadened and acoustically better space vs my acoustically kind of fucked up basement, admittedly. My amp is a Fender Princeton 68 Custom RI. I recently changed out the speaker for a Creamback, which I thought improved but did not entirely fix my sonic issues. It's a weird amp, it has some great sounds but gets muddy if you turn the bass up much, which might be part of why it's hard to EQ out the harshness without losing the twang that I like.

The neck pickup is fine but it's not that twangy, and a little bit bland imo. I feel like there has to be a sweet spot of twang with some of the edge taken off.

Sorry correction, it has what I guess is referred to as an "ashtray bridge." It does not have one of those ashtray bridge covers which is what I thought you meant.

CAD - will keep you posted on the Porter pick-ups, really hoping I like them

The neck pickup is fine but it's not that twangy, and a little bit bland imo. I feel like there has to be a sweet spot of twang with some of the edge taken off.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, February 10, 2022 10:36 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the sweet spot is probably called getting lollars or fralins or some other boutique tele pickups

or porters!

I've never bought/installed a boutique pickup, but I have this weird thing where I hate the name "Seymour Duncan" and love the names "Lollar" and "Frailin," just tasty names for some tasty tele twang.

Another thing I've thought about is doing a four-way mod and using the middle position. Right now the middle position on my tele kind of sucks.

using the series position I mean

Seymour Duncan is the standard for bass pickups imo.

my jaguar has seymour duncan antiquities which fucking rule, so do not count out SD. they're a big boring name in the pickup world but they know what they're doing.

If you'd like a less expensive "classic Tele" bridge pickup which sounds pretty great, I can recommend the Tonerider Hot Classic. I think it's the same factory that did the highly regarded original Classic Vibe pickups. They're under $50 new, or cheaper used.

certainly better than the stock 80s MIJs, I adore those guitars but not their pickups.

Very interested to read about the Godin + Porter pickups results

I tried using Godin for a while in the live setting before switching to an archtop. I play fingerstyle acoustic normally and wanted something that would approximate the feel and sound, while working at any viable volume. Their odd stratocaster hybrid was appealing on paper and in the hands but ultimately the sound just wasn't exciting enough for me to stick with it.

maybe a daft question, but are there any pick-ups where you can route the top and bottom sets of strings to separate channels and then have a stereo output so you can send bass notes to a different fx chain, so you could have dirty distorted bass with clean sparkly treble etc?

i guess the workaround is splitting the signal and sending it through high pass and low pass filters

I haven't tried this, but it looks like the Submarine pickup might be the solution - you could stick it under the low strings and send it to a bass amp, or under the treble strings and put them through high gain.

https://img.audiofanzine.com/img/product/normal/2/6/262828.jpg

https://www.submarinepickup.com/

ah, that looks perfect - thank you!

That’s a fucking cool idea

Are the stock 80s MIJ tele pickups just known to not be that great? If so it actually makes me feel better because I was starting to think “maybe I was wrong and I never really wanted a twangy tele after all.”

Crud, bad img tag but you get the idea. This work?

http://www.guitarsite.com/files/submarine-pickup.jpeg

It is a fucking cool idea, ngl. I can imagine someone who is deft with a loop pedal could go beyond sounding like two guitars. You could become a guitarchestra.

Very interested to read about the Godin + Porter pickups results

I tried using Godin for a while in the live setting before switching to an archtop. I play fingerstyle acoustic normally and wanted something that would approximate the feel and sound, while working at any viable volume. Their odd stratocaster hybrid was appealing on paper and in the hands but ultimately the sound just wasn't exciting enough for me to stick with it.

― flamboyant goon tie included, Friday, February 11, 2022 6:44 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm a huge believer in Godins in terms of quality vs. price. I don't think there's much out there that compares. However, they are 1) apparently incapable of making a guitar that doesn't look kinda dorky in some way and 2) their in-house pickups seem to be really dull and lifeless pretty much across the board

With you on point 1. I am also unconvinced about the utility of cutesy little EQ sliders on the front of a guitar (which, let's face it, you can't see and are unlikely to manipulate while playing). Especially since at any subsequent point in the chain there will be multiple opportunities to shape the tone.

rant: Which is its own problem! Even modest rigs have so many tone-shaping options that the mind reels. I'm like, hmm, should I mess with the graphic eq here next to my armpit? Or maybe the other knobs labeled "tone" at the bottom of the guitar? Or how about I mess with one of the 10 or 15 knobs labeled "tone" on one of the 6 to 10 pedals in front of me? But then I turn around and look at my amp and, shit, there are two or three or four tone knobs there too. Hmm. Oh fuck, the amp is mic'd and that mic is going into a channel strip with multiple tone knobs, then into a mixer. Are there tone knobs on the mixer? Yeah you betcha. Are we done yet? No, because the recording or performance will be mixed and mastered by people who are turning knobs and moving sliders that relate to tone.

Welp, guess we're done with tone but - no wait! Everyone listening to this music will be doing so on a device that has tone controls.

ha yeah it's funny, also why i'm a skeptic on "tonewoods" for electric guitars, though knowledgeable people that know way more about electric guitars than i seem to think it's something

though w/my godin, i've been in a couple stores in the last week casually shopping and this neck, fretwork, fit & finish on a guitar that retails for $850 (i got mine for $600) is good or better than plenty of $1500ish guitars i've played recently

Clearly the "literally only pickups matter" crowd is wrong and probably basing everything on some oversimplified scientific tidbit they picked up. Wood should make at least *some* difference, although I don't know how much or why. There's some interesting theorizing about it in this thread:

https://www.jazzguitar.be/forum/guitar-amps-gizmos/70017-how-does-acoustic-resonance-change-amplified-tone.html#:~:text=Changing%20the%20pickup%20height%20certainly,field%20the%20strings%20are%20in.

But if how the body of a guitar resonated literally made no difference, a les paul would sound exactly like an L5 as long as they had the same pickups and strings.

The test would really be whether a Les Paul and a L5 are as similar/different/uniquely identifiable from each other as two Les Pauls or two L5s are from each other no?

There are an enormous number of variables - pickup winding, pot values (10-20% variance on average IIRC) strings, string height, pickup height, etc. - where you can’t just throw out two differently-constructed guitars and say they sound different.

If there are audible differences (which I doubt to be honest), they’d be so minute as to be irrelevant when you’ve got a tone control and amp EQ.

I definitely think some of the unplugged acoustic sound indirectly makes its way into the final amplified sound. Regardless of whether the pickups are microphonic or not.
When you strum an unplugged guitar, you are hearing the string vibrations die away, and they clearly die away differently on different guitars. This implies that different guitars will subtract from the initial attack in different ways. So the pickups are still going to pick some of that up regardless of whether they can detect the acoustic vibrations or not.
It might not necessarily be the wood species playing the biggest part, it could be other factors like the guitar's overall construction style. But I am fairly sure that some of the unplugged sound does indirectly go through the pickup.

Yeah I feel pretty confident it does too, in some indirect way if not microphonically, and I doubt guitar makers have simply been wrong for decades as proven by experiment guy on youtube or whatever.

Artisans are a terrible place to turn to - see: audiophile snake oil thread - because whatever they were taught and what they've done has been successful for them so it must be true. Thomas Keller will tell you to rest your steak on the counter for half an hour before cooking, despite the fact that this does nothing and if it did it would be negative. But Thomas Keller has 20 Michelin stars and you don't, so who's the better chef?

Sustain, pick attack, etc. are introducing a lot of outside questions to the idea of tonewood ie 'can you hear a difference in ash and alder or between a rosewood fretboard and a maple fretboard.' The way a guitar is built changes your approach to picking and strumming, some bridges will have more sustain than others.

Just thought I'd throw in a tangent here:
What's everyone's take on double neck guitars?
Are they irrevocably associated with 1970s rock star indulgence in a way that would always lend them a certain comic air?
I don't have any immediate plans to buy one, but I have sometimes thought that you could do cool stuff with them. Like, if you had an open tuning on one neck and a standard tuning on another one, the combination would probably be interesting.

The comic air is the cool part.

bass/six-string double necks are the way to go

http://www.first3songs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/boris-sydney-first3songs-olga-0933.jpg

Always thought it was cool that those were built for Takeshi by the high-end custom shop at First Act

For all those times when you want the bass to drop out during the guitar solo

Juliana Hatfield has a high end First Act too. It sucks that the company collapsed, because they could've put some cool stuff in the mid-range market if they'd ever gotten their shit together.

https://bigtakeover.com/images/21943.jpg

xpost I had thought it would be cool to have a 12/6 string double neck and do a live loop pedal thing, layering 12 string stuff over the base of 6 string loops

When I think about double neck guitars my mind immediately hears four seconds of a tv show that aired 27 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n1l-_UiWbs

Followed by remembering how much my cousin and I used to make fun of this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZbSDuS4Pyg

Batio! He's absurd, but I just recently watched a video of him doing a guitar clinic and he seemed like a super nice guy.

https://abernethyguitars.com/available-builds/sonic-empress-thc119

I like these that are half Fender offset, 25% prewar acoustic and 25% 1950s department store guitar.

ffs why would you choose to do a slotted headstock