Sunday, May 17, 2009

Telecaster Modification - Gotta Love a Blondie

Recent work on a second incarnation of the Blonde Bombshell... The first two modded Telecasters (the first was blonde and maple, the second antique white and maple) sold right away, so I thought I'd do another.

The second incarnation ("Marilyn Monroe") is a beauty with a ceramic GFS crunchy mini humbucker on the neck position, a nice hot Don Lace Sensor Red Strat pickup in the center, and a nice simple vintage-style MIM Fender reissue Tele bridge in the bridge position.

This particular guitar started life as a MIC Squier Affinity Special Edition Telecaster... but it came out the other side of my custom bench - not quite the same thing...

This particular guitar has a custom bone nut, a mint green custom pickguard, hand chiseled cavity, and a 5-way switch:
Bridge/Bridge-Middle/Middle/Middle-Split of Neck HB/Neck HB

I used the Seymour Duncan wiring method for this, just in the reverse of an HSS Strat-style wiring diagram with the use of a nice USA Fender 5-way blade switch. I used a decent Sprague Orange Drop tone capacitor and opted for Alpha full-sized potentiometers on this particular guitar.

It plays like a dream. I crowned, dressed, and end-filed the frets by hand, polished them up, and leveled them to be smooth as glass. Very nice playability, and one-of-a-kind sound with versatility. You can get the basic Tele bridge sound of old, plus a little bit of a Strat-like sound, and that down-and-dirty Gibson-like sound on the neck. The other two positions give new sounds unique to this instrument: and they're both great on clean, jazzy, overdriven, or even distorted.

Here are some drooly pictures for my mod fans:












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