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Vintage threads from the first ten years

Tele pickup tone options

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4/20/1999 8:05 AM
lou	Tele pickup tone options Is it possible to use a mini-hum in the bridge position and set up the three way switch to get tones like an esquire. Any ideas? Thanks Lou

4/20/1999 8:43 AM

I think the standard one pickup Esquire had the following hookup:
---Bridge pickup wide open, volume control only
---Bridge pickup with vol & tone controls connected
---Bridge pickup with preset tone capacitor & volume control

When you say mini-humbucker, did you mean something that fit the standard Tele bridge plate cutout with two rows of adjustment screws like Duncan, or a dual blade type like DiMarzio, or did you mean an actual gibson-style rectangular case mini humbucker?

There might be a rails/ dual blade version of the tele bridge pickup available, but the other two types wouldn't have the 3-point mounting/height adjustment required for the std bridge plate. You could modify one of those american standard, or similar aftermarket, flat plates to take alternate adjustment screw locations, but the stamped vintage style plate has the sides too close for any screws, left or right, out past the pickup bobbin.

With a pair of coils, which any of the HBs will have, you can wire the pickup in the standard series humbucking mode along with the esquire switching. It won't really sound like an esquire. I suppose if you tapped one coil, it may sound closer, but one coil of a series humbucker usually has less output than a standard single coil fender pickup. With a more complex switch, you could wire up the guitar to have quite a wide range of different tones depending on how you connected one, the other, or both coils (series or parallel, in or out of phase, etc.).

4/20/1999 12:24 PM
lou	Doc, I have a SD Mini -hum, tele bridge for a hum mount. So the Esquire had preset tone capacitors which gave it it,s three different tones(never played one). I would like some kind of variation with one pickup if possible. Any ideas Thanks Lou

4/21/1999 5:19 AM

I seem to remember the Esquire has tone full on, tone working, tone full off as it's switching options. I actually thought it was a pretty terrible set-up, but I know some like it. It should be pretty straight forward to achieve with a three position switch, but I bet it could be improved upon without too much work.

Check out:

http://home.swbell.net/jatchley/wiring/index.html

There's a wealth of info on wiring pick-ups in there!

Liam

4/21/1999 6:16 AM
LIam	Or another one with a preset tone cap option is: http://w3.ime.net/~cygnus/anderton_jpeg.html Looks pretty interesting

4/21/1999 7:48 AM
lou	Thanks for all your input. This should get me started. Cheers Lou

4/21/1999 11:04 PM

Lou:

I have a SD Hot Rails tele bridge pickup and IMHO it is just too dirty. Another problem is that one of the rails misses the high E string and the other rail misses the low E string. I've heard lots of good things about their Little '59, and if I were to do it all over again that's what I would have gotten!

While I'm not crazy about wiring the coils of a humbucker in parallel on a LP (Dimarzio "Dual Sound") I do think it works better with a Tele bridge pickup (since the parallel sound is closer to a typical stock tele bridge pu).

Steve Ahola

P.S. So do you have only a single pu on your guitar?

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