Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Time for a new blue telecaster guitar build!

Hmm. It's that time of the decade again.. I have a hankerin' to build a new guitar. I'm a strat guy, but who doesn't like Telecasters. they're like the Stratocaster's in-bred Hillbilly cousin. My favorite guitar these days is my Lake Placid blue strat with the rosewood fretboard and white pickguard. What better compliment than to make the same damned thing in a tele. I just have to decide on a maple or rosewood fingerboard. I'm going to go obscenely thin on the neck, something in the Ibanez Wizard style which is .750"on the 1st fret and .820" at the 12. Thinnest neck style on the market. You can FLY on that neck and the tone sacrifice is negligible.

So I looked around on the net, found some pictures and photoshopped them the way I want it to look. Mmmmmm looking good. I'll really do research on the pickups this time around  because that's the real hit and miss part of any guitar. You never know how the damned things are going to sound until you slam them in there. I have almost always bought on verbal recommendation from people I hope know what they are talking about. Seymour Duncan has a good page (I've had great luck with their stuff) where they try to give you an idea of what the different models will sound like, but again, different neck, different guitar, different wire and schematics, pots, whatever.. ALL DIFFERENT! So good luck getting that similar sound. Every beast sounds a bit different.

First off I have to sell a guitar to make room for this one. The first guitar I ever made was a tele , a monstrous natural flame maple with an SRV neck and Nashville 5.2 pickups I started right around Sept 11th 2001 (I remember because it got held up in shipping at the border because of the towers getting hit). Very nice but overkill for me. I don't play it very much and it's wasting away in it's case. I'm not sure why I'm even thinking of parting with it, maybe it's just the itch to slap a new one together again. One thing I've learned is the telecasters I liked as a kid where the beat up ones Prince or Bruce Springsteen used to play. The ones that look like they've been thrown in the back of a pickup truck. My nice natural flame maple one is far too pretty...
 Anyone want to buy a used custom telecaster? Muhahahahahahaha!



1 comment:

Kenmore said...

Gotta go with traditional maple neck on a tele.

Selling the old one? Not interested unless you beat it up a bit in the back of your pickup...