I like my son of ben with a hard clipper in front of it, but don't often play it by itself. Mine is also pretty noisy, which could just be user error/sloppiness.
I very recently put a fender bari neck on my MIM tele. I think they advertise it as 27” scale but it’s a little shorter IIRC.
I’m using the mammoth slinky 12-62s for B-standard tuning because that’s what fender ships on their Squier baritones, though I might actually bump up to the slightly...