Here's Black Bart (left),
April 2011.
Another on-going project that MIGHT have finally come to its pleasant end.
I'm definitely digging the new look with the rosewood fingerboard, and that's a keeper... for now!
Originally, I put this together as kind of a "parts-mule" project/testbed to ear-test a set of Seymour Duncan Lil' 59ers. Here's how it all went...
I started this on-going project (aren't they ALL on-going?) in '02 with a WD Music Products body (black) and neck (maple 22-fret), and a set of Seymour Duncan "Lil 59er" pickups (the neck pup is the Strat model, rather than the Tele model). The pickguard was a custom-cut by Warmoth, and I installed a SuperSwitch , wired for my "Five-Tone Tele" setup, and put in a push/pull as the tone pot to coil-shunt both pickups.
The WD body and neck were a nice, snug fit, but, disappointingly, I had to shim the neck to get the action I wanted. That's life. I also decided that I wasn't crazy about the look of this bridge with the "barrel"-style saddles, either - I think I prefer the look of the StewMac bridge with the Strat-like saddles that I used on my mahogany thinline project. But, it's mounted and it works, and so it stays.
With the S-D pups in humbucker mode, the "Lil 59er" in the neck is pretty convincing, if you're hoping for a "regular" humbucker tone, but the bridge pup, even in humbucker mode, retains some Tele twang and bite. When coil-shunted, the sound has just a bit more "regular" Tele vibe, but the biggest thing I noticed was a drop in output/volume, rather than that much of a change in the tone (for an update/improvement on that idea, see "update" below)
Once the the Lil' 59ers were tested and approved, they were moved over to my pal Mychael's three-pup foto-flame MIJ Tele (left). Yes, three pup. I rewired it with the same SuperSwitch setup I used in "Black Bart" for five tones out of two pups; a coil shunt push/pull does 'em both (that's ten tones) and the middle pup is on a push/pull for on/off - and that makes TWENTY COMBOS! Mid off=Tele tones, mid on=Strat tones - and they all sound pretty swell, if I do say so myself.
Update 6/2009: So, I've been playing with adjusting the polepieces of humbuckers, trying to unbalance the coils to get a sweeter tone and make the coil-shunts less of a drop in gain - see my ES-333 and Black Magic Strat pages. I tried those same types of adjustments to the Lil' 59ers in Mychael's Foto-flame Tele, and I must say I was quite pleased with the results. It really brought the coil-shunt tones to life, with a lot more twang and body.
With the Lil' 59ers gone, I reloaded "Black Bart" (right) with a Fender Tex Mex Tele set. I used a stock-looking W/B/W white pickguard at first - so it LOOKED like a regular ol' stock Tele, "lipstick" style neck pup and all. I was afraid it was gonna seem tone-deprived, after them S-D Lil' 59ers, but I was pleasantly surprised - the Tex Mex set holds its own. Of course, I did leave the five-tone switch in it, and chanted my magic over the pup adjustments. I always mount the neck pup HIGH and TALL to get it a bit hotter, I feel it's a better balance with the bridge pup that way, and the series tones are just a tad "sweeter."
After a week or so, I felt that the "look" just wasn't right with that stock-style pickguard, so I snagged another black pearl pickguard from Warmoth for it - that was such a nice look with the S-D pups. Still, it just seems to me like there's something visually askew about this axe...
April 2011: Got a wild hair to do another Tele, and decided to use the WD maple neck to do the test fittings on it - so it got pulled off of Bart. In the meantime, I swapped the rosewood-fingerboard neck off of the Les & Leo Page-O-Caster over to Bart, and it just added that certain something that was always missing (to my eye)...
Bart truly is Black Bart now - I guess I just never bonded with the maple/black combo. The rosewood neck has the traditional 21 frets, so it doesn't have that squared-off overhang that the 22 fret maple neck had, which I think also may have subtly detracted from the color scheme. That has been cured!
The switch is run through all five notches, neck to bridge, one notch at a time. It's Black Bart with the Fender Tex-Mex pickups loaded, playing the same riff (more or less) on each notch. The amp and guitar volume and tones were untouched - you are hearing it exactly as I played it, warts and all. I just dropped a mic in front of my amp and ran it into my computer's sound card. NO TWEAKS!
NOVEMBER 2006: OK, so you say you don't think you'll find a use for the series/out of phase tone? Check out the solo in this tune: "Eldorado/PB&J" from my '03 Christmas CD (produced for family and friends). All the guitar tones are ol' Black Bart, but played with a little enhancement here to better demonstrate the combos. The solo is the series/out of phase combo played through a Behringer V-Amp and recorded into my Roland VS840EX. The MP3 file is almost 3MB, so if you're on dial-up, click at your own risk...