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.
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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…
