Re: Nashville Tele vs proposed Tel-o-caster!

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5/30/2003 1:21 PM

Mark Hammer

Re: Nashville Tele vs proposed Tel-o-caster! Long before we had any footswitchable technology that would make a neck pickup stand out as much as it can, the neck pickup was viewed as the "rhythm" pickup (for people to blithely strum unobtrusive chords in the background), and the bridge pickup was seen as the spotlighted "lead" pickup. Many of you will see this on your pickup selector controls somewhere. The simplest way to make the bridge pickup stand out against the warmer rhythm tone for the purposes of a solo was to simply kill the high-end rolloff. In the case of single coil pickups, the need to retain high end is even more pronounced since the changeover to a bridge pickup invariably loses overall volume when you can't bring the bottom end along with you. Preserving the top end in those cases retains your "cutting power" as a lead instrument.     I hate to keep harping on it, but you will note that tone cap values have traditionally been selected or optimized for neck pickups. Yet one more clue that suggests the historical need to be able to adjust the tone of neck pickups more than that of bridge ones.

 

5/30/2003 8:40 PM

Gil Ayan

And I had thought all along that the tone of the Telecaster's neck pickup with the cap fully engaged was supposed to compete with the jazz tone of the Gibson hollowbody electrics of those days... I am sure I had read that somewhere as well.     It probably didn't take Fender all that long to realize the sound of the neck + cap was unusable, and so they eventually rewired the Teles and discovered a new sound.     Gil

 

5/30/2003 9:09 PM

Mark Hammer

Actually, that sounds pretty plausible too. If you've ever heard jazz guitarist Ed Bickert (who plays a Tele that is *very* muted), it makes perfect sense.     What I don't know enough about is the degree ot which country forced a changed in the Tele, or the Tele changed to tap an existing country market. Anybody know? Given the brouhaha about the uniqueness and trendsetting nature of the Merle Travis Bigsby guitar, my gut sense is that there was very little approximating Fender tone in the country market at that time and Fender sort of drove it. Those of you with a better sense of Fender history would know more about this sequence of events. There is probably something about it in the 3 foot stack of VG I have lying at home, but I'm too busy to dig through it.

 

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