More Telescapades....(Part III) V 2.0 8-18-23 New Demo added

MichaelW said:
Well as of last Friday I am officially unemployed.

All good, it was an amicable and mutual exit and I received a healthy severance package. Planning on taking a sabbatical, which I've been wanting to do for a couple of years now.

Nevertheless, I'll be on a fixed income until I find another job and I don't plan to even start looking until at LEAST July or thereabouts.

Aside from the couple of guitar projects that are already "in flight" there's going to a "slow down" on building anything new for a while:)
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Congratulations @MichaelW. I recently passed my 3-year anniversary of having no W-2 work and I've never been happier
 
Hey folks, back from my little vacation to the lovely state of New Hampshire. Had a lovely week up there hanging out with my siblings and extended clan. Mind boggling that we had 4 generations there and even more mind boggling that I was of the eldest generation! :oops:

Did a lot of eating, catching up with everyone and napping. Got to jam with my brother, which is always fun.

Travel was uneventful....until after we landed back in Orlando. My wife was on her way to pick up me and the kids from the airport and her car broke down on the highway. Turned into a nightmare trying to get a tow truck out there. It didn't get towed until the next day, what a pain. I hate AAA.

Anyway, after all the tow truck drama and finally getting the car to the dealer and returning the rental I had to get at the airport, I finally had the chance to be home and get back to some pending projects.

First up was finishing this tele build.

So turns out the neck route was just a little too skinny for the CC pickup so I had to widen it a skootch, while I was at it, I decided to deepen the bridge route as well. These CC pickups from Lollar are very tall.

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I've read that the CC's tend to be noisy for single coils, so after I repainted the cavities with shielding paint, I decided to add a little extra grounding insurance with foil tape to make sure everything was grounded well.

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Here's a little hack for stringing tele's (or any string through type bridge. Sometimes it's hard to get the plain strings through the bridge plate hole, I use a tube from a spray can. Feed it through the top, then feed the string into it.
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Some finished pics.
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Continued in next post.....
 
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The Blonde Sisters.......
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I only got a chance to play it a little bit last night. This is my first time playing CC pickups.
They are......unique for sure. The DC resistance is fairly low yet the output is huge. Both pickups have humbucker level output so I had to adjust my rig to compensate. The pickups were overdriving my delays.

Rolling the vol and tone back a bit I can definitely see why these are so popular with the jazzbos. I'm not a jazz player, I'm just a poseur that knows a couple of licks. But those couple licks sounded good!
Throw on a little light gain and you're definitely in blues territory. Really great sounding pickups!

I'm not happy with the neck. Not exactly sure why yet. It may be a visual thing because I messed up the finish stain with the amber nitro.
But even beyond that, some how the neck taper feels a bit off to me.

This is my second Warmoth neck in a row that I did not like the feel and profile. This was their "59 Carve".
I'm going to live with it for a bit to see if I get used to it.

Once I get my wits about me, I'll record a demo and update this thread.

I've got a couple more projects still in flight that I'll post in another thread.

Thanks for following my journey!
 
Finally getting around to doing a short demo of this guitar.

I'm still trying to get the hang of these pickups. They are different from anything I've ever played in a Tele.
They are fairly hot too even though the DC resistance is pretty low. They're both massive pickups with huge ceramic magnets under them.

I've had to change the amp settings and pedal settings on this guitar.

They have a PAF-ish response to them even though they are single coils. I've read that these can be pretty noisy but I haven't found them to be any noisier than any other single coil Tele pickups.

They have a lot of low end, especially the neck. It can get a bit wooly if you don't roll off the bass a bit on the amp. I really like the neck pickup.
I'm a bit less enamored with the bridge pickup. I may wind up putting a hotter Tele bridge pickup in at some point.
It was a fun project although it's going to be a niche guitar for me. (Even though I haven't quite figured out which niche it fits yet heh)

Anyway, here's how it sounds, clams and all.....

 
Well, time for a change.... :ROFLMAO:

I just wasn't feeling it with the Lollar CC pickups in this guitar. Maybe if I had played one before going down this path with this build I may not have.

Or maybe if I was a jazz player like Tim Lerch.
But I'm not...heh. This was a cool guitar but just not for me.

Since I Charlie Christian route is large it can accommodate virtually anything else you'd want to throw in there later.

So I decided to try something different. I mentioned these pickups in my "Mailbox" post.

It's another Planet Tone "Mean Mistreater" mini-hum in the neck position and a Planet Tone 1951 Tele for the bridge.
The bridge pickup is interesting in that according to Jose, Leo originally designed the Tele Bridge pickup to be a lot more powerful than it ultimately wound up being. And this pickup is a recreation to those specs. It's wound to about 10k. Which balances well with the mini-hum which is about 9.2k.

This is the first tele I've built with a humbucker in the neck, so a new experience for me. It sounds KILLER.

I'm working on a demo for Jose for this and all the other pickups I've recently gotten from him.

I had to do some trick wiring to get it all to work. I re-used the 500k pots I originally had in the guitar for the CC's but for the bridge Tele pickup I used a parallel resistor to make it "see" 250k for both the vol and tone pots.

I also took the neck pickup completely out of the tone stack, something I've started modding on most of my Tele's. So the tone control only affects the bridge pickup. I pretty much never use the tone control on the neck pickup on a Tele and it's nice to preset the tone of the bridge pickup.

I also went with a bit of a different look with a tort pickguard.

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MichaelW said:
Well, time for a change.... :ROFLMAO:

I just wasn't feeling it with the Lollar CC pickups in this guitar. Maybe if I had played one before going down this path with this build I may not have.

Or maybe if I was a jazz player like Tim Lerch.
But I'm not...heh. This was a cool guitar but just not for me.

Since I Charlie Christian route is large it can accommodate virtually anything else you'd want to throw in there later.

So I decided to try something different. I mentioned these pickups in my "Mailbox" post.

It's another Planet Tone "Mean Mistreater" mini-hum in the neck position and a Planet Tone 1951 Tele for the bridge.
The bridge pickup is interesting in that according to Jose, Leo originally designed the Tele Bridge pickup to be a lot more powerful than it ultimately wound up being. And this pickup is a recreation to those specs. It's wound to about 10k. Which balances well with the mini-hum which is about 9.2k.

This is the first tele I've built with a humbucker in the neck, so a new experience for me. It sounds KILLER.

I'm working on a demo for Jose for this and all the other pickups I've recently gotten from him.

I had to do some trick wiring to get it all to work. I re-used the 500k pots I originally had in the guitar for the CC's but for the bridge Tele pickup I used a parallel resistor to make it "see" 250k for both the vol and tone pots.

I also took the neck pickup completely out of the tone stack, something I've started modding on most of my Tele's. So the tone control only affects the bridge pickup. I pretty much never use the tone control on the neck pickup on a Tele and it's nice to preset the tone of the bridge pickup.

I also went with a bit of a different look with a tort pickguard.

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A paper-in-oil cap AND a silver mica cap. Pulling all the mojo stops.
What's that metal film resistor for? Mini hum too loud?
 
I had to do some trick wiring to get it all to work. I re-used the 500k pots I originally had in the guitar for the CC's but for the bridge Tele pickup I used a parallel resistor to make it "see" 250k for both the vol and tone pots.
Click to expand...
 
andare said:
A paper-in-oil cap AND a silver mica cap. Pulling all the mojo stops.
What's that metal film resistor for? Mini hum too loud?
Click to expand...
The silver mica + carbon film resistor is my current favorite treble bleed circuit, 680pf cap plus 150k resistor. I've tried a lot of combinations but this one seems to be the most transparent to my ears. The values are what John Suhr uses on his guitars and where I got the idea from.
 
Ok, here's a demo of the re-born Tele Thinline.

Very very different guitar now than when it was first birthed.

This pickup combination is absolutely killer. The neck mini-hum sounds fantastic in a Tele. But also very different than the same pickup I have in a Les Paul. Clear as a bell, but it's got balls when pushed, never muddy, which is always something I've hated in most mini humbuckers I've tried in the past. The Mean Mistreater with an Alnico II leans more towards a P90-ish single coil sound without the hum of course. A bit thicker in the mids than a Firebird pickup.

The 1951 Tele bridge is an interesting pickup. Seems to be able to morph from a classic Tele into a more hum bucker-like response when pushed hard.

Recycled backing track (sorry) but it just worked well for this demo.

 
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