Old Friends, Old School...


 

Evening all - I almost forgot to post this evening, so taken with the frenetic shenanigans of the political classes and associated media was I. Well, actually, no, I just got wrapped up in watching Rick Beato on YouTube: top channel, top guy: check him out. Apropos of things musical, I was talking to Pete Evans a couple of days ago - great songwriter and a lovely bloke - about, well, guitars and stuff. I have a few instruments in my collection, and Pete asked me which was my favourite. The immediate answer was my oldest: the old Eko acoustic pictured above, bought for me on a loan basis by my mother in 1970 for £28.00, which wasn't exactly chicken-feed for us as a family in those days, although relatively cheap. I hold my hands up: I still owe her the money, and she's been gone these last fifteen years.

The guitar will far outlast me: it's much battered and modified form stands testimony to so much experiment and exploration over the decades since I first had it, even becoming a solid-bodied electric at one point in the seventies. Over the past couple of weeks, though, I've reacquainted myself with another much-modified and also relatively cheap guitar: the Fender Telecaster pictured alongside the Eko. This was one of Fender's so-called 'Modern Player' series of non-American-made guitars, and cost me around four hundred quid or so, ten years ago. A nice-playing instrument, it unfortunately though came with an awful, cheap, split-coil humbucker bridge pickup, and a middle pickup of uncertain utility. The other thing was a frankly 'orrible six-saddle Strat-style hard tail bridge, which I replaced with a Fender ashtray plate and three-way brass saddles, old-school style, and bunged in a Tonerider Tele bridge pickup, which frankly, is the bee's knees for not a great deal of cash. I rewired the thing so that the middle pickup would simply be paralleled across whatever the current pickup selection was, on a small switch. It offered some interesting, if not particularly consistent, tonal options into the mix.

However, since I picked the guitar up again, I realize that the only pickup worth using is the bridge pickup, Esquire style, and that the other two are pretty much redundant. So, my next modification is to strip out both the bridge and middle pickups and put on an Esquire-style scratch plate to cover up the empty pickup cavities, and simplify the wiring loom in the process. Like the Eko, the Tele is an open book for experimentation: the basic platform is essentially a playable neck: the heart of a guitar: the rest is just about how you project that playability through tone.

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