Telemaster
This is a post about The Best Guitar In The World - my Telemaster.
My Telemaster in a rare state of rest.
My Telecaster Jones
For years I jonesed for a Telecaster. I still do, actually. Guitars are so expensive that normally, when I get a new jones for a certain guitar, I make myself wait and wait and wait in a protracted state of excruciating anticipation before actually buying the thing. This could last for months or years, during which I torture myself by thinking & dreaming about the object of my desire, and I even write songs with it in my head before I even have it. The worst is looking at Ebay auctions, where I just dangle myself over the precipice of buying the thing. It’s times like these when I often think to myself, ”If only I were rich, I could just get this fuckin thing RIGHT NOW!”
But there are a couple benefits to the wait. First of all, when I finally do execute, I have that awesome feeling of hard-earned entitlement. Yeah, it was expensive and yeah it’s probably a frivolous thing, but dammit I earned it! And there’s another benefit - circumspection does actually help one to make better decisions sometimes. Imagine that! Well, that was how it worked in this case. Because yes I do wish that I owned a Telecaster. But my Telemaster is even better than a Telecaster, I say, and it took a couple years of fiending to discover that the thing even existed.
Anyway, yeah I was jonesing real bad for an ur-vintage style Telecaster. The purity and simplicity of that design, the killer gritty sound. The guitar is so ubiquitous that it’s absurd to name-drop Tele players, but I do have my own faves. Enjoy some neck-bendin’ goodness from Will Seargent on Echo & The Bunnymen’s All That Jazz, and the completely bezerk tone that Jimmy Page gets on this old version of Communication Breakdown. And I couldn’t leave out pal Ted Nesseth, or how cool Keith Richards, Joe Strummer and Bruce Springstein look wearing theirs. At a certain point, these guitarists and Tele-ness in general just started driving me wild. I even grafted a Tele pickup and deluxe-style Tele bridge onto my Univox strat to try to at least get somewhere Tele-ish without spending much money. See my ”Guitars Come Apart” post about that guitar.
MJT Built My Hot Rod
I’m pretty sure that I first saw a picture of a Telemaster in a google search, one of the images on the Telecaster Forum. So I saw that image and immediately I knew, this is the guitar for me. I love the Jazzmaster/Jaguar body shape, of course. After years of Jazzmastery, it just feels like home to me. I think it also looks killer, and of course it’s bigger than a Tele or Strat - there’s more wood there and you can even be a little fat and still play one. ha ha!
When I started looking for a Telemaster to buy, I couldn’t find any whole guitars, or anything that was actually a real Fender. Now I know that they’re out there, but there aren’t very many and they don’t come up for sale very often. Apparently, the Fender custom shop did make a few of these, or was at least rumored to have made them. Some ex-Ibanez people called Malden have built the Malden Mozak, which to my eye looks fruity, skewed & wrong. Someone out there also says that Fender was at one time gearing up to produce the Telemaster as an official limited-run model. None of that helped me actually get a guitar, though.
Whoah, it turns out this store in Chicago will make them for you!
I did learn that what you can get all the time are pieces of the guitar - bodies, necks, electronics and hardware that you can put together. So I bought my guitar on Ebay, in pieces, from MJT Aged Finishes. I completed a buy now sale and they contacted me with a checklist of my desired details. MJT specialize in relic finishes, which I’m not interested in myself. So I had them do a “closet classic” treatment for mine. It took quite a while but the timeframe was at the outside edge of what they’d said it was going to be, so that’s fine. My guitar has a light swamp ash body. Now that I have an ash guitar, I can’t believe that I’ve ever mucked around with other woods. Where have you been all of my life, Swamp Ash?? Holy shit, it sounds good - very rich, complex, sparkly and springy.
As part of the MJT deal, I was able to choose my own neck from the allparts catalog. For someone accustomed to the high-end Fender “vintage hot rod” necks, that was a big mistake. The allparts build & finish quality were really terrible. The neck was also extremely fat - like, surreal fat - and ruined the tone of the guitar, making it overly bright & harsh. So I bit the bullet and bought a vintage hot rod tele neck from my favorite Ebay seller The Stratosphere. That’s a big bullet to bite, as these things go for around $700 just for a new parted-out neck! But I can’t say enough good things about them. The soft-V strat necks on my Creamsicle Jazzmaster and EJ Strat are sheer buttery glory and really make those guitars rad. The Tele neck is C-shaped and right in line with the quality of the strat necks. Adding that neck rounded out the tone and made for extremely fabulous playability. Anyone wanna buy a big, fat, shitty allparts neck? I still have it.
MJT did a wonderful job finishing the guitar and pulling it together. I love all the options they gave me - little things like did I want a matte or gloss finish? I chose matte. Did I want a checking effect on the nitro finish or not? I chose yes. And they aged the hardware nicely too. Definitely very cool guys with very cool stuff.
My Telemaster, begging to be played again.
I just wanna say something about 1-piece maple necks - they’re the best. As I’ve said before, following a series of disappointments, I have resolved to NEVER put a rosewood neck on a Fender again. I know it’s a bit extreme, but when I see Fender guitars with rosewood necks, they look bastardized and corrupted to me. Like a bit of Gibson crossover. Extreme, I know. But still.
Electronics by Spock
If you think the foregoing describes an obsessive, geeked-out tedious fucking mindset, then you ain’t seen nothin yet. Because I did go Spock on the electronics. First, I wanted to make sure that I got excellent vintage style pickups. Know now that I am not at all interested in putting any pickups besides Tele pickups in a Tele-style guitar. I know they have their limitations, but to me those pickups are 90% of the guitar’s sonic character right there.
For years I’ve played Seymour Duncan pickups, which are consistently great. But I’ve had a Seymour Five-Two bridge pickup in the Univox Strat and I think it’s just ok. It definitely sounds Tele-ish, but it doesn’t have Godhead Factor. It’s a bit opaque and sterile, if that makes sense. It’s as if the sound is obscured by a thin layer of vagueness. There are other premium pickup makes and a number of boutique makers out there. For some reason, the moss-covered dwarvery of Lollar bums me out. Fralin is too strat-steeped. I’m sure these guys make nice pickups, but.. meh.
So I read around in the Telecaster Forum and saw nothing but raves about the Fred Stuart pickups. I think Fred used to make Tele pickups for Fender? He’s in Orange County and hand-winds the occasional batch of “black guard” Tele pickups. I found him here on Virtual Vintage Guitars and ordered a set, with reverse-wind on the neck pickup. They are not wax-potted. I had to wait a while, but I was waiting for the guitar anyway. They are amazing, just wonderful. They’re really open-sounding, super complex and multi-dimensional. And the output is just right. I’ve been playing the guitar mainly though a VOX-AC30 50th anniversary head. Here is a recorded example - See-Thru Kowboy. There’s some Fender Twin in there too, pretty obvious from the harder, reverby sound. And the metal part at the end was played through my crummy little transistor Vox practice amp.
I was worried that the unwaxed Fred Stuart pickups would be too microphonic, but I actually dig the incidental sounds I get from them. Just like hearing fingers sliding on the strings of an acoustic guitar, hearing a heavy pick click & clack over pickup covers, pickguard and bridge gives the listener a really cool impression of tactility and humanity. Neither pickup ever squeals, and both get totally bitchin harmonic overtones and cooperative, sustaining feedback. Especially through the AC30. Here’s another track where I alternate between neck & bridge pickups a bit - Throw Them To The Wind.
Telemasters all over the place.
Because I was creating the guitar from scratch, and because I had the time, I researched and thought through all the components. I ended up buying an NOS Carling 3-way pickup selector switch. For the rest, I ended up emailing with a guy named Dirk in Germany (his website is singlecoil.com) who seemed to have some good stuff and some hyper-informed opinions about tone capacitors. I bought silver teflon wire, some military grade pots and a couple different tone capacitors from him. I still have his recommended tone cap in the guitar, though the value isn’t high enough for me and I’m going to change it. It’s a special ceramic cap that he found, and it does sound mighty good. I think it contributes a subtle flutey thing. Dirk describes it as being slightly leaky, in a way that favors some musical harmonics. I agree! I also have a Sprague orange drop from him that’s probably worth trying. But overall, I need a higher value in order to get the occasional darker tone.
You can get really insane about tone caps, it turns out. They really do affect the sound of the guitar, even when your tone pot is turned all the way up. Check out this psycho’s videos to see what I’m talking about. I’ve used Angela paper in oil caps on my other guitars, with pretty high values. I’m re-thinking all of that nowadays. It’s a nichey little frontier.
Ain’t No Jazzmaster Replacement
So yeah, that’s the deal with my kickass Telemaster. It’s the best guitar I’ve ever owned and I love it. By now, the finish has pretty much stopped out-gassing and I’m doing my best to break it in - playing obsessively, every spare minute. The body has a few nicks and that’s just fine, but I’ll baby the neck as much as I can. Besides putting strings on it and trying another tone cap or two, I don’t plan to do anything to it.
I do like it better than my Creamsicle Jazzmaster. The overall quality is just better, and it’s made of swamp ash as opposed to alder or basswood or whatever the Creamsicle is. The black & tortoise shell Jazzmaster I used to have - an American vintage ‘62 - was almost as nice as the Telemaster. But of course that guitar is gone. I do realize that, as great as the Telemaster is, it can never replace a Jazzmaster. That’s because the Jazzmaster has a certain very unique sound and because it has the whammy bar. Maybe my next jones will be for a custom ash Jazzmaster. Hmmmm, yes… but I have no emotional space for that right now. I’m in love.
****
Ahh, one more thing is that, by happy accident, this guitar actually looks from certain angles a bit like Captain Sensible’s old Gibson Firebird. That Firebird was one of my aborted joneses. I loved this particular photo (below), totally pictured myself playing one, could obviously hear how good it sounded in Captain’s hands, loved how it was different from the Firebird II, all that. But when I tried a real one, man was I disappointed. Gibson had it all wrong. The thing looked cool, but it played like hell. It was totally anti-ergonomic. Worse, for a new replica they wanted $2,500. And the thing had obvious manufacturing flaws. Fuck that. Anyway, now I feel like I’ve captured a bit of the Firebird feeling, for way better playability, sounds, etc…
Creamsicles Are For Licking
I’ve neglected my blog, but now I’m back. Lots has changed for me, in many ways. Even in the guitar ways. Well, especially in the guitar ways! Guitar change is just a function of time for me, and it has been a while, right? But man, I’ve got something taking shape right now that’s gonna kick your balls off! (Venom reference, if you missed that) What I have in the works is a semi-official mutant and, uncharacteristically for one of mine, it’s actually being done beautifully. All the deets are coming soon.
In the meantime, I thought I’d warm this space up with a quick update on The Creamsicle. This is my beloved Jazzmaster mutant. See the previous post for details on this guitar’s genesis. Last time we saw this one, it was in dire need of a neck, its second MIJ neck having warped. Well, you know what I decided? I decided that rosewood necks suck and I don’t like em. And I’m never gonna put another rosewood neck on a Fender guitar again!
That’s the negative way of looking at things. On the positive side, I just adore the “hot rod vintage” neck that I put on the EJ Strat. Experiencing a braineurysm one day, I took it off the Strat and put it on the Creamsicle. It fit. Oh, it fit really nicely. So I got another one of those hot rod vintage necks for the Strat and now here we are with the gorgeous maple-necked Creamsicle that I think is better than any Jazzmaster I’ve ever played..
It even matches the Orange cabinet. The black pickup covers and knobs were my 5-year-old boy’s idea. Can’t argue with that - it looks very cool, I think. It plays extremely well too, the 9.5” radius and medium jumbo frets being a big improvement over the vintage style 7.25” and thin frets, in my book.
The EJ Strat with the same neck demonstrates that playability improvements could still be made - the Strat has better action & sustain because it has a better bridge. But I think this Creamsicle is really in the sweet spot of playability vs. character, and I don’t want to change a thing about it. I find myself playing & recording with it more often than with the smoother Strat, especially for the main track of a tune, where I think it’s important to have a unique sound.
With their two-piece bridge and tailpiece thing, Jazzmasters have something that most solid body guitars don’t - that reverby, resonant length of string behind the bridge that adds so much character, uniqueness, and unpredictability. The vintage Jazzmaster hardware and dimensions are problematic because the tailpiece is so far back that the angle of attack of the string on the bridge is really low. With the resulting low tension over the bridge saddles, this makes for some sustain limitations and causes the strings to buzz sometimes and to jump out of the saddles with really hard playing, especially when you still have the original Jazzmaster-style grooved bridge. Over the years I’ve learned to solve those problems, mostly, either by filing deeper grooves into the Jazzmaster bridge, or, as in the case with the Creamsicle, by using a vintage Mustang bridge which is the same as the Jazzmaster bridge except for the saddles. I also wrap the posts of the bridge with electrical tape so it doesn’t float so much in its postholes.
Fender makes some new versions of the Jazzmaster, called “Player’s Jazzmaster” that take some of the pain out of the arrangement by moving the tailpiece up toward the bridge. They also use Gibson tune-o-matic bridges. I’ve played a couple of these and I get it, but I like mine better. I think you lose some of the character and a lot of the sympathetic reverb when you shorten that length of string. And my modded Mustang bridge is just as good for me as a tune-o-matic.
Some people do what Robert Smith of The Cure did with his Jazzmaster when he played one. He added a brass buzz-stop thingy which sat in between the bridge and tailpiece and forced the strings down hard against the bridge in order to kill the reverb and to increase the angle of attack. No question, his guitar sounded cool. But I still think one loses something in taming this beast.
Anyway, I love my Creamsicle and that’s that. Stay tuned for more on the next project, which I think is even cooler!
XO
Dickey
Guitars Come Apart
I discovered at an early age that electric guitars can be taken apart. Over its short and brutal life, my first electric guitar, a sunburst Les Paul copy from the Sears catalog, suffered all manner of disassembly, reassembly, experimentation, and ultimately, destruction. In fact, in its final configuration that poor guitar consisted solely of a neck joined to a splintered, hewn-down scrap of wood slathered in white boat paint. I had also nailed a DiMarzio Super Distortion II pickup to the wood and had emblazoned “Zerstörung!” (that’s German for destruction) in red model paint where the pickguard should have been.
Ever since that time, I have owned very few guitars that I’ve left alone - only my beloved Goya strat copy, a vintage Mosrite Ventures model, and a vintage Fender Mustang have I left stock. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that I only owned the latter two for a couple months. I’ve tweaked almost all my guitars, mostly inexpertly. But they do what they need to do and it’s all sorts of fun. Since I’ve been doing a lot of guitar tweaking lately, I thought it would be fun to write about the current stable of mutants.
Creamsicle Jazzmaster
One night in 1993 I had a dream of a gorgeous vintage pale yellow Fender Jazzmaster that gave me “that sound,” and with which, in the dream, I regaled thousands of screaming fans. After that dream I became obsessed with Jazzmasters. Fast forward to 2010 and by now I’ve owned 3 of them. The first was a sunburst Made In Japan (MIJ) Fender ‘62 reissue which I ended up destroying at a Pie show at Boston University in 1996. The destruction was an accident, at first - I loved that guitar. I ended up replacing that one with another MIJ reissue, this one curiously light & snappy. It would become The Creamsicle Jazzmaster.
The Creamsicle Jazzmaster began life with a white finish and red tortoiseshell pickguard. Not my first choice, but it played so well I had to have it. As far as I know, Fender has never made a Jazzmaster exactly like the one in my dream - pale yellow with a dark brown tortoise-shell pickguard. And I’m not careful & patient enough to have duplicated such a finish myself. When I saw The Flaming Lips play The Rat in Boston in 1996, Wayne played an orange Jazzmaster. Remembering that show, I decided to sand off the white finish and, with orange spray paint, to approximate the radness of Wayne’s guitar. I got hold of a white pickguard to complete the look.
And thus The Creamsicle Jazzmaster was born. Somehow, the goopy, toxic spray paint has not ruined the sound of this guitar. The body is made of either a really light alder or maybe basswood. It’s the best-feeling guitar I’ve ever worn - the balance of it. And being light, it has a great snappy sound and instant jang-jang keening response. I put Seymour Duncan “Hot For Jazzmaster” pickups in it, like I always do with Jazzmasters. That’s MY pickup, so I can’t help it.
The only crummy thing about this guitar is the neck. The first one warped badly, which is why I played a black US-made reissue as my main guitar for quite a while. I replaced that neck with another MIJ neck a couple years ago and guess what.. it just warped again. I can’t believe it. Anyway, this lovely guitar is currently taken apart, because its neck is messed up. And the pickups have been donated to my Custom Strat.
From L to R: Squiremaster, Creamsicle Jazzmaster, Custom Eric Johnson Strat (phase 2).
Custom Eric Johnson Strat
This is my main guitar, my best guitar at the moment. I made it for myself after my US-made Jazzmaster was stolen. It’s an Eric Johnson alder body with THE BEST GUITAR NECK EVER MADE - a Fender hot rod soft-v vintage strat neck. I bought the body and neck from the Stratosphere on Ebay, then put it together with a custom pickguard from Pickguardian, and various Seymour Duncan pups in a couple different configurations:
- Phase 1: Seymour Duncan surf pickups neck regular, no middle, bridge angled.
- Phase 2: With the same Seymours, but both angled, as pictured. That was the prettiest look for this guitar. Like a Fender Lead II or Mustang.
- Phase 3: Now the Seymour Duncan “hot for Jazzmaster” pickups from the Creamsicle are in the Strat. Well, the bridge pickup is. Seems that in the process of trying to add the SD hot pup to the neck position, I fried it. Oh well. Instead I added the US reissue stock neck pup, and it sounds great - a little brighter and bouncier than the hot one.
Here is the Custom Eric Johnson strat today, with Jazzmaster pickups crammed into a mutilated pickguard.
Squiremaster
Right after my black US-made Jazzmaster got ripped off, while I was quite contrite over the circumstances thereof, and just before I’d resolved to put together a really nice guitar, I decided to do what I could with a real cheapo guitar I had that I actually really liked. Just to see if a cheapo guitar could become my main squeeze. Well, the experiment ultimately failed. It’s not my main guitar. But it is fun and interesting. After much violent routing and such, I fitted a Jazzmaster bridge and tailpiece/vibrato into a Squier strat. No mean feat. No graceful one either, but if you squint at it, it looks pretty cool. See the first pic above, first on the left.
Because the Squiremaster is so light and because it has a Jazzmaster bridge & tailpiece, it has a really great & unique sound. Here is a Bruises Of Unknown Origin track recorded with this guitar, back when it had a Seymour Duncan twang banger Tele imitation bridge pickup for a strat. Now it has a JB Jr. Anyway, check out screw me to hear it go.
Univox Strat
When he retired, my excellent neighbor John moved to Costa Rica and left me a bunch of guitars. The Squire that became the Squiremaster was one of them, and also a Cameo Mosrite copy bass. But the best was this Univox Strat. It had been seriously modified and damaged before I laid paws on it. The wood was so fried that there was no way to resurrect it with a whammy bar.
Still, it’s always been super fun to play and has lots of songs in it. The very first time I plugged it in, the Richard Bitch song Sit In The Sun came flying out of it (that recording features the black US Jazzmaster, though).
I messed with a few different pickups on this one, and it sat around for a couple years taken apart. A couple months ago I started lusting after a Tele, and having a Tele pickup and bridge around, I decided to graft them onto the Univox. So I chopped into a strat pickguard and added some other SD pickups I had, and here we go..
The Univox Strat with tele bridge pickup. Sounds fab.
Cameo Mosrite Copy Bass
Well, here it is. It has a US reissue Jazzmaster bridge guitar pickup in it. With total frankenstein hardware on this thing, I can’t quite get the intonation right, but it’s really light and fun to play. It’s very clean & bright with the Jazm pickup, but still has enough output to make amps bristle. A caveman job for sure, but super fun. Listen to this track by The Bronson to hear it in action: Eskimoes
Yep, so that’s the mutilated stable at the moment. I’m sure in a year from now most of them will have different pickups and the Creamsicle will be back in action. Maybe it will even have become my dream guitar by then.
Out,
Jxxxx
