This hand-built guitar started life as an old coffee table from a garage sale, complete with scratches and cigarette burns. Beneath the surface, a beautiful solid piece of Mahogany, perfect for a guitar body. Here's the SG and more detail.
Features: Solid Mahogany sculpted body, two vintage-style humbuckers, tune-o-matic bridge, and solid stop tail. 24.75-inch scale, Mahogany-stained Maple neck with Rosewood fretboard. The neck is actually intended for set neck application and needed a bit of modification at the heel to fit my application; a recessed, conventional bolt-on contruction. Electronics include seperate volume and tone controls with three-way switch (neck, both, bridge pickups). The neck volume control has a push/pull switch to utilize the tapped pickups; in the up position the pickups are configured as single coils and produce a brighter tone. In the pushed-down position, the pickups are in conventional dual-coil humbucker configuration and has a vintage, warm and jazzy tone. The humbuckers measure 7.46K for the bridge and 7.21K for the neck with the split coils.
This guitar is a real joy to play; Nice big neck, amazing access to the lower registers, awesome sustain, lots of tonal possibilities, good weight distribution and balance. One can play almost any music style, though I'd still prefer the Stratocaster twang for some kinds of music. This guitar is stringed with Earnie Ball, Regular Slinkys for a bright clean tone.
Another guitar one would wonder? The Telecaster is a unique guitar that's been around a long time. Always wanted one. For this one I choose an all-Maple design; 1.75 inches thick, solid Pacific Maple body, Stratocaster Maple neck with Maple fretboard and Vintage pickups. The electronics feature a five-way selector to use the pickups in combinations of parallel, series, in phased or out of phase. My custom, flamed Maple top, blonde Tele reproduction and closeup detail here.
This guitar plays and sounds like a vintage Tele. The 5-way selector gives a range of usable tones. Great sustain and high end tones coming from the Maple body.
Experimented with various aftermarket Tele pickups; Tonerider Vintage+ set (TRT1B-BK -- 5.83K 1.96H, TRT1N_NK -- 6.67K, 1.95H), DragonFire (Coolrails at bridge -- 12.08K 2.28H, TEF-CR -- 4.0K, 2.0H in neck position), and a Vintage Telecaster set (6.72K, 3.12H bridge, 6.68K, 2.05H neck) from Wildberry Castle's eBay store. The WBC set best suited my taste. Interestingly, although some of these pickups have similar electrical properties, closer inspection revealed different use in type of magnets, coil geometry, and base materials. These pickups all sound differently, obviously, the humbucker rail sounded a bit warmer, like a humbucker should. The single-coils versions varied in the amount of high-end tone (treble).
