WIRED AND WONDERFUL TELES How many ways can you wire a Telecaster with a humbucker in the neck
Fig. 4 - Fitting the bridge plate helped me to mark the sides of the new neck pocket walls, so the neck would line up correctly.
Fig. 5 - Two hours of filing later and I had a neck fit snug enough to pick up the neck without the body falling off – even without any neck bolts fitted.
position? It may be more than you think! Wired like a standard Fender, a Tele gives you three pickup settings but if you’ve got a humbucker in there, as my project has, the total number of theoretical settings is more than 20. How come? Well, bear in mind that the Wilkinson Platinum Series pickup I’m using – or any other humbucker for that matter – contains two coils. In most guitars, these are wired in series/in phase… and that’s the way they stay. However, they could be wired in parallel and/or they could be out of phase, or one of the coils could be off. Theoretically, once you bring the treble pickup into the equation, there are as many possible combinations as on the Brian May Red Special we looked at last month and a standard Fender Strat put together! In reality, many of the combinations will sound very similar, or just not that great. So if you design a circuit that accesses every single one of them, you’re likely to have a hard time on stage trying to get the sounds you want amongst a mass of settings you don’t like. The circuit I’m showing this month is a standard Fender Telecaster wiring – proof if it were needed that Leo knew a thing or two about electric guitars (Fig. 7). Next month, I’ll take a look at some useful variations on the theme.
VOL CAP TONE
Fig. 7 - This diagram is one variation on the standard Fender wiring. Note that the capacitor needs to be both the lug and the casing of the volume pot. Standard values are 250k for the pots and 0.22mfd for the cap. It’s a good idea to run an earth wire between the casings of the two pots and also to the bridge plate.
Q & A WITH SIMON
Q A
I bought a guitar online and I’m generally happy with it but the G string is quite high at the nut end of the neck. Lowering the slot in the nut would definitely make the guitar easier to play but I’m not sure how to do it. Also, an open E chord sounds very out of tune compared to other chords because the 3rd string is bending sharp. I’ve been playing for a few years but I haven’t had this problem before. Any advice? Steve: Basildon
I’m the victim of the same problem this month! I bought the neck for our build online and I suspect the nut was cut by someone who has never played guitar. The slot for the high E is wide, shallow and well… totally useless (Fig. 6). Fortunately, because it’s so shallow, I’ll be able to cut a usable slot without swapping out the nut, and so can you. For wound strings, the best tool for the job is a
proper nut file. Unfortunately, a nut file can set you back £25 – and that covers just two slot/string sizes, not every gauge on the guitar’s neck. Generally for unwound strings, an X-Acto razor saw is a great tool because it has fine cutting teeth and a blade only 10 thou thick (that remind you of the gauge of anything?). You can buy one from a craft shop for about £7, maybe less. When it comes to the 3rd string, you’re pushing your luck a little with an X-Acto because you’re cutting a slot that needs to be around 17 thousands of an inch with a 10 thou blade.
Rocking the blade from side-to-side a little as you cut can help, as can using a piece of folded wet-or-dry paper to clean up the slot afterwards. (Somewhere around 600 grade, or a bit coarser, is OK.) It’s important that the slot isn’t narrower than the string because the string will probably force its way in as you tune up but it might stick and it could actually crack the nut in half! The saw/file blade should follow the angle that the string will take from the nut to the machine head, which is approximately parallel to the head on a guitar that has a tilt-back head. This gives the string a clean break as it enters its ‘speaking length’. If you make the angle of the slot too shallow, the string may leave it somewhere earlier than the front edge, giving you intonation problems, and possibly giving you a buzzy-sounding string.
The big fear when cutting a nut is you’ll make the slot too deep because the only way to fix that properly is to replace the nut. You can gauge the height by taking a sheet of paper out of a note pad and folding it in half. Now press down the string at the third fret. If you can just slip the paper under the string, you’re about right. There is now an extended PDF on the Playmusic site called the Hot-Mod Guitar Nut Guide, which contains more tips on cutting and replacing guitar nuts. Alternatively, a pro setup at a repair shop won’t cost you a fortune. PM
YOUR ON-LINE LIBRARY
If this all sounds like techno-babble to you – or you’d like more technical detail – please download my Hot-Mod Pickup Primer and Brian May Guitar Tones pdfs from the Playmusic web site -
www.playmusicpickup.co.uk.
Also, if you like the sounds you hear in
Fig. 6 - Look closely at the high E slot and you’ll see it’s almost non-existent. I’ll need to cut it properly.
the accompanying videos - on our Hot Mods page - but you don’t have soldering skills, you might want to ask a guitar tech to mod your existing guitar. Or try a Brian May Red Special guitar – it’s a relatively affordable and high-quality instrument.
pickup439
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