For Bob Bain, it meant taking one guitar to a session rather than two. With a neck humbucker installed, you can enjoy a more varied tonal palette. The octave harmonic, pickup centre and centre line of the body have been marked and now the routing template is being positionedFenders are easier to modify than most of the other classic guitar brands and if you make a mess of the woodwork, you can hide it under the pickguard. Combining both pickups provided timeless country and rockabilly tones, but for power trios and early hard rock, some players found the little metal-covered Tele neck pickup sounded rather dull and weak. This wiring scheme lasted until 1967, so plenty of Tele players decided to rewire their controls. Read more: Tech Talk: How to fit a Mastery Bridge to a Jaguar with a mute Compared to pretty much every other twin-pickup electric guitar, the Tele only had two useable sounds when it should have had three. Broadcasters and Nocasters all had the blend circuit and in 1952 this was altered to provide bridge and neck pickup settings with a tone control, and a neck-only setting with a very pronounced treble roll-off. Getting the position of the new pickup accurately marked out is crucial to a successful humbucker installationSo why were Teles seen as fair game by Messrs Bain, Collins et al? At the risk of offending vintage purists, Telecaster wiring didn’t get off to a great start. Granted they’d often strip them, repaint them and maybe add a Bigsby tailpiece, but hacking them up to install different pickups and trick wiring only become commonplace in the 1970s. Keef’s famous Blackguard ‘Micawber’ wasn’t fitted with a humbucker until 1972, so while it might be the most iconic example of its type, Robbie Robertson, Albert Collins, Bob Bain, Terry Reid and many others beat the Rolling Stones legend to it.īack in the 1960s, players didn’t modify their guitars that much. DIY Workshop: How to install a humbucker in a Blackguard Telecasterįitting a full-size humbucker in the neck position of a Telecaster is sometimes called the Keith Richards mod but he was by no means the first to do it.
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