We’re asked weekly what our recommendations on three-pickup Nashville Tele setups are. The thing about a Nashville Telecaster is that it’s meant to be as versatile as possible, and not necessarily to have all three pickups match volume and output perfectly.
There’s no real rule for a specific set we make for a Nashville style, three-pickup Telecaster, but we have a few pairing suggestions that may help you.
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Typically, when we start researching and designing a new humbucker, we wire the pickups in the simplest and most common way possible: in series, with no coil tapping, phase switching, or parallel options. We want to hear the purest tone possible from the pickup in its essential form. Sometimes this takes many hours; sometimes it takes years.
Continue reading →The mystery of the ‘59 Jazzmaster tone.
I still see discussions on internet forums about whether the wood in an electric guitar has any effect on its tone, or if it’s all in the pickup. There are some people who insist the instrument itself makes no difference in its tone.
There was a good series of articles a few years ago in the Guild of American Luthiers quarterly magazine about how just the body shape of a solid body electric guitar affects nodal patterns of vibration at different frequencies—just the shape of the body!
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The term humbucker probably brings to mind the “Gibson” sound, or rather – and more specifically – the “Patent Applied For” or “P.A.F.” sound. The pickups made by Gibson in this narrow time frame, spanning from the late ’50s to early ’60s (though the patent was officially awarded in 1959) have become synonymous with what a humbucker “should” sound like. Never mind the fact that rarely would you ever find two P.A.F.-era pickups that share the same exact sound, but that’s a whole other topic unto itself. Because of this, what is now considered a traditional humbucker has become as much form as it is function.
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When replacing potentiometers (pots), there are differences in shaft size you’ll need to be aware of. The shaft we are referring to is the part of the pot with threading that sticks through the guitar top or pickguard where it is held down by a threaded nut. First, there are differences between metric vs imperial shaft diameters, with metric being about 1/4” in diameter and imperial being 3/8” in diameter. In my opinion, if you have the smaller diameter shafts, it’s worth reaming out the hole to accept a 3/8” shaft. The larger diameter pots are typically higher quality in all aspects. Fortunately, you will usually only find small diameter pots on the cheapest guitars. Always use a reamer to enlarge the holes because a twist tip drill can crack the wood of the guitar top.
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