Let's Talk About Fender Telecasters [And T-Shaped Objects £139 - £Thousands] - That Pedal Show

dan i was thinking i want to know a bit more about telecasters well nick you've come to the right place [Music] so [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh god [Music] [Music] hey everyone welcome to that episode dan here mick here hello well this is gonna be fun that was a spirited beginning daniel uh sorry i'm yeah i'm laughing because he's just like giving it everything we've got a uh princeton and a deluxe reverb fairly way cranked and um yeah it's the sound of ages it's a glorious noise right today we're talking about telecasters uh we recently did a show on strats which was after me banging on about it for years mick finally succumbed and we did a shower struts i had many questions and mick had many answers loads of you wanted to do a similar thing on telecasters now it'll be a bit different than the show we did on strats because the telecaster is essentially a much simpler instrument which is of course part of its charm part of its beauty but there are some questions to be answered about telecasters yeah and a little journey through the ones we've got that sort of demonstrate a point here and there we thought yeah let's do let's get all the telly's we've kind of can put our hands on and counted 11. yeah most of which say fender or squire on the headstock and some of which say something else so they are not telecasters they're t-shaped objects but anyway we'll get to those maybe we'll get to those indeed um i want to start off dan and and ask because in in the context of that pedal show the telly is has always been and always will be dan's guitar why the telly what drew you to it when did it begin so i was a strat player for years and years and after much uh saving and stuff i managed to get a 1964 l-series strat it was in bits the neck was on a blade guitar the body the guitar neck was on this thing and the guy gave it to me and said if you want to swap the necks over and put that back on that and here's the original pickups and everything you can have the guitar for a couple of grand wow this was back in 1994 and it was all the money in the world i had i took a massive pun it had a it was sort of dug out for floyd rose right i thought i took a massive punt and i took about six months to put this guitar back together and it was stunning and i played it for about a year and then it was stolen and it was the day it was the night of a gig and uh i thought well i've got to get a guitar and a friend of mine had a telecaster and so i had all this my same gear same pedals and that and stuff and the only difference was the guitar and i plugged this thing in and i was like whoa what tell you was it it was remember the strat plus i do it was the equivalent tele version maybe a tele plus yeah and it just sounded phenomenal i had a jerry donahue pic i seen what i can bridge pickup in it and i just because we did a lot of rock stuff and just the rock thing on it was just it immediately changed my mind on what yeah he was there there's a huge amount of we were talking about this before we started filming you know at this point in time i think we could be fairly confident among the wonderful tps audience that tellies are cool right i mean and it wasn't always that way that's the thing when i first started playing strats in the 90s teles were really not cool yeah and the the common perception of a telly was that it was brash and brittle and thin and why on earth would you ever want that country guitar isn't it funny because i remember seeing status quo um play live for the first time and and i was so a friend of mine was supporting them by the way i was backstage and i heard this because i didn't know i didn't have a clue who quoi were right and i was backstage and i heard these guitars and i went oh my word that is crazy i thought that must be les paul's you know not two telecasters i couldn't believe it it was amazing but but even though there's been examples of that sound throughout when there was this idea that the telly was a thin scratchy you know um neck pickup was pointless you know and i sort of discovered really quickly that um the telly was the guitar that i wanted to be able to play because what i found really quickly on the telecaster is that i had no vibrato my whole thing was a strap with this okay and i thought well that's something i've got to sort out if i couldn't play it on a telecaster you know what i mean i couldn't plan on something so simple like this that i knew there was something wrong with what i was doing um and because it is such a direct sound like so we've done it before with the strat where you just hit the guitar it's got like a built-in spring reverb but because of the directness of the telecaster you hear everything yeah and um there's no hiding on a telecaster you know because of the nature of things out because of the frequency range it's got those there's no the the mids are all there yeah you know what i mean um so what i heard it started playing i thought i wanna i want to get really acquainted with this guitar and see if i can actually do something with it and i never played anything else for ages and ages and that and well so dan we'll talk about dan's tellies as we go along i think a good place to start might be if if we look at butters yep and this yes uh i'll pick up butter to begin with if you like if you don't if if you're not okay with telly's right this is what it looked like in 1950 more or less yeah first ever production solid body electric guitar amazing 1950 mad in it we'll hear we'll hear them side by side in a sec now so ash body they weren't always ash um sometimes they were pine and sometimes they were older which we'll talk about in a sec but most commonly for this your sort of standard what they call black guard telly for obvious reasons ash body maple neck bolt on maple neck two single cord pickups you know all about that you tend towards that spec yes which is later yes this is like this so this is a 63 spec so we still have the round lamb rosewood fingerboard um the earlier ones were slab but this has got the the round planned thing on uh but the frets are still going to the maple a bit they do a little bit apparently yeah they can do um so yeah so that rosewood there with an all the body yep so different body wood um but the rest is basically the same there's the difference with this guitar is the the bridge pickup which is just the most mad sounding thing with the beveled magnets on it and i've been i mean i'd really rarely see these yeah so the spec changed over the years we'll hear them in a sec but the classic black guard yeah they were called broadcasters in the beginning this is not a history lesson you can look that up on the internet then they became new casters and they became telecasters but the classic spec is this should we hear them back-to-back right we've got the deluxe reverb and the princeton reverb we had them on before for shall we recorded and they just sound absolutely spectacular so we thought we're just going to leave them on for this um okay so just the amps on their own um a bit of reverb in the amplifiers bridge pickup [Music] so [Music] so it just from that right there's you can tell this is warmer as there's a woolliness in the bottom end as a mid-range there's a yeah it's a warmer in the mids as well whereas that is all pokey it's fat right but there's a poke and an edge to this thing which is out of control still a bit of gain on a minute i'm quite interested in this because the way that this guitar deals with overdrive is is quite spectacular so just a mild gain yeah or a bit of protein protein okay all [Music] right [Applause] [Music] wait [Music] so [Applause] [Music] that is the sound that i've got used to over the last five years here in a telly week in week out and no matter what guitar i pick up that thing always is just uh louder more present overdrives in a like really present way yeah it's a really unusual thing isn't it and it just i i guess what we're galloping towards here is the kind of fact that they can rock um wow like nothing else um one thing that we were sort of touching on when we're talking about getting the show together is you know when we talk about like fuzz circuits right no circus in general the more simple the circuit the more important each individual piece is it's the same with the telecaster because it's such a simple guitar just the difference of a you know um a slight change in the uh voicing of the pickup or a bridge saddle or whatever has a massive impact now i'm not exactly sure what combination it is with this guitar gives that sound but there's something about the way this has come together because it's not a particularly um high output pickup is it do you know how the dc resistance is uh 7.6 7.6 k right so if any of you those of you know anything about pickups that is you know that is not high no not at all but there's it's the combination of of whatever it is that gives this guitar a certain thing and that's the same thing with all the telecasters that you'll play because they are so simple there's a few things the the saddles yeah pickups um the uh even the bridge plate has a big impact um this is actually a bridge plate from a 50s telecaster that a guy working at a guitar shop in sydney he had a bunch of he said i'll try that one don't worry it doesn't fit exactly it's exactly right i think it doesn't fit properly um but yeah all the little things make a massive difference with the with the telly i wonder if we should um progress in that vein then and let's bang through a few guitars and have a listen to the bridge pickups because we've got a bunch of guitars here today before we do that let's just take one step on from this so this is 63 spec i've got an actual 1965 guitar here yeah so dan this red one is a custom shot guitar and this one is so this is 1965 uh proper proper one original come on right [Music] so [Music] huh [Music] so this is like a cross between this and butters almost it's got a wicked midhonk hasn't it yeah it does but it's got it's still warmer it doesn't have that quite the same edge as this yeah but yeah it does have a real you know midi thing too so when you're playing what would make you choose either this one or that one then um if i'm doing so if i put a bit of gain on and you'll hear like with the the same pedal we had before there's a um it's lower output and just more of a classic vibe with [Music] this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] so you know this is so forward and so rock it's completely different yeah yeah yeah it's completely different there's a twang there's a there's a there's a twang that that guitar has which i it's like i remember when i first heard that guitar the very first uh vintage guitar show that we did yeah um and i first heard that guitar and i just fell in love with that sound and it ended up buying the guitar indeed um i liked it so much i bought the company but again round lamb fingerboard um this is older and this is ash yeah um we think it's ash yeah i think so i'm pretty sure it is um but vastly different sounds yeah you know within the brackets of telecast of course of course okay well so for those of you who haven't switched off already going wow one of those guitars is three and a half thousand dollars the other one is four and a half thousand dollars and the other one is probably ten thousand dollars um what about the other end yeah yeah so we do have if i could ask you to hold on to this one dan so that is now the most expensive guitar in the room i actually think this might be the cheapest guitar in the room yeah it would be except for the pickups that are in there okay so we can't use that one this roll vt i don't know you wait ages for an unboxing video and then two come along in one week squire fsr bullet telly mnpmt purple metallic mn maple neck and it's the danish peat one we ordered one when it came out 149 quid or whatever they were literally never opened it cool [Music] it's been a hard day so what i'm going to do next is i'll take these strings off put some of my strings on there and just do a really super basic setup job on it [Music] [Applause] well i'll tell you what's interesting about that is i don't know what strings they come with but i've put the ten and a halves on and the nut doesn't really need doesn't need any attention they've just gone in there fine so i'll read into that whatever you will more or less the picture have a quick look at the truss rod yeah that's fine the action might want to go down a touch but i'm actually tempted to leave it where it is [Music] do you know what that's blooming cracking straight out of the box new set of strings plays absolutely fine [Applause] [Music] and the intonation is is pretty much bang on the action is totally playable for me might be a bit tiny bit high for a beginner but winner so you know what this is all about yeah this is now we think this is the least expensive guitar in the room i think they were 139 pounds or something like that no way check that neck out unfinished wow or it's mostly unfinished feels like it's got maybe it's got a real thin sealer or something on it how cool yeah so not sure what the body's made of some sort of solid wood hopefully maple neck i think we should side by side them shouldn't we okay [Music] alright [Music] [Applause] [Music] honey that sounds great it's not bad isn't it it's really good we'll get your stuff go in a sec let's try some overdrive [Music] [Applause] me [Music] hey [Music] so that mid honk with game is where it kind of sort of stands out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] wow this is great isn't it there's not much wrong with it man just try the neck pick up a minute [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh that's a bit of a different story yeah but i think what it shows you is that for you know next to no money literally you've seen the unboxing so you know what's happened to this guitar um that's really impressive pretty amazing isn't it yeah yeah yeah it's pretty amazing um do we listen to some other bridge pickups yeah totally because is it fair to say that that that guitar sounds thin sort of generalization is still prevalent it i think i think the idea of thin gets confused with with bright right you know what i mean just because there's a lot of attack a lot of trouble and forthright miz doesn't mean there's not bottom end there um but the it certainly cuts through you know um but that's you know they're a rock machine you know joe strummer ac30 telecaster rock machine yeah um yeah right so yeah other bridge pickups your fattest bridge pick up [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] there it [Music] [Music] [Applause] so that sounds fantastic [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this still has loads of that bite about it but it's massive it still sounds really really fat that's so cool [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] that's pretty fascinating what you saw there was dan's custom carl longbottom guitar with the proper kunife uh wide range humbuckers they're not kunafa actually it's a different magnet but that it's there's a whole story yeah magnet but they are proper wide range humbuckers as close as close as you get as close as you get okay uh i believe the second guitar you heard was um vt okay second job this might be a bit more fiddly my friend ollie good friend ollie photographer friend ollie gave me a guitar before lockdown first lockdown could you put a new pickup in i'm like yeah sure uh cue months going past where i haven't done it so let's see if i can do this in time what do we got an ollie it is a what looks like a mexican standard telly ah cool really cool that looks like a mexican standard telly wicked and apparently somewhere in here is a new bridge pickup that he wants putting in it bare knuckle pickups so this is a so 11.5k ceramic magnet um blade pickup [Music] both pickups oh my god bridge pickup [Music] i think we can hear that that is a beefy son of a gun let's string it up and get it in the room okay [Music] [Applause] yeah just a quick tour de force of different um telly bridge pickups or at least t pickups in t-style guitars and you can draw your own conclusions that i thought the blade pickup in the standard telecaster retained tele sound yeah totally in a way that this and the long bottom do less sure and i don't know how much of that's to do with how it's mounted in the bridge right i think it's got something to do with that it's all got all to do with it what were your under the fingers what were you where were you feeling can you remember um i just i guess i'm so used to this thing it's it's it's still home there's a the long the the long bottom guitar with the wide range humbucker um because i had an old custom with wide range humbuckers in it it's actually left left-handed guitar that i converted to be right-handed how crazy is that only um but it had a couple of the white road temperatures in it and it was just the most mammoth sounding guitar and that's got that thing about it certainly the fattest of the boats yeah yeah um the the vintage the 65 that's when you can hit this that's probably the lowest output of the bunch but that mid shape that that guitar's got and kind of when you hear the gain it's like oh okay there's a dynamic around the mid branch with the el guitar um [Music] i think the the squiers like stood up incredibly well yeah uh like it's really impressive bridge pickup wise yeah yeah yeah i've but i've got to come back to this for just for being rock but still being a quintessentially telecaster yeah i have to find out what because this is this is the the customer shop pickup but i've got no more information than you know it came in the guitar this is 2001 um and i didn't get one of those fancy booklets that told you everything about what the like i did with when i got butters yeah it came with this you know so you've got no idea i got no idea no idea it's made in the shed out the back but well yeah it's just those um bevel magnets is the only thing obvious thing but yeah very rock okay so that's the sort of bridge pickup thing i think one of the other really misunderstood things on the telecaster is the neck pickup and i use the neck pickup all the time you know as soon as you go up the dusty end i'm pretty much always on the neck pickup and the other thing is because i'm doing uh jazz bits and pieces at the moment i find it really wonderful for doing jazz stuff yeah well i mean there's been a number of famous jazz tele players down the years absolutely so ted green yeah you know when i first heard him do his jazz stuff on on that his old um i think pretty sure as a black guard it's life-changing stuff you know it's just absolutely phenomenal um yeah there's been a number of really wonderful um telecaster players there's a tim lurch as a guy i'm looking at the moment and he just he's constantly blowing my mind yeah yeah he's got i think a charlie christian pickup neck pickup in his old telecaster um but yeah wonderful telecaster player uh yeah so i mean let's get um grab the butters out so from the bridge [Music] pickup it's just so chimey and amazing and then just for the time control and suddenly you've you're you're a jazz [Music] yeah it's it's it's a wonderful wonderful jazz guitar and again it comes back to that simplicity of this thing um if you can make it sound great on a telecaster um there's an amazing uh what's his name he's got he's got some custom gretch pickups um with ron ellis oh come on julian though julian lage oh my word go and have a listen to him on the telecaster doing his jazz thing it's just wonderful so i don't know if it's the simplicity of guitar that a lot of jazz guys tend towards but there's something about the sound of that neck pickup but the other thing that the neck pickup can do is you know going back to tone on and i find what can help with this is a little bit of volume rolled off on this but there's a it's almost strategy so i put some tube screamer on [Music] uh [Music] [Music] let's have a listen to some neck pickups then yeah yeah because that's kind of interesting i'll hand you guitars you just do the thing [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] uh [Music] uh [Music] [Music] this has got it man this is amazing [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] uh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] best sounding telly nate pickup in the room absolutely obviously not a strat but there's a you know this is no i just thought it would be good for context at the end yeah totally it's so there is more of a bite out of that yeah you know but it's really interesting that there's a misconception that the i've heard people say yeah that the telecast network is basically pointless pointless and useless and incidentally if you do there have been a number of developments over the years in in telly neck pickups one of the more recent really popular ones is a pickup defender do called the twisted telly pickup and i actually think the the you saw dan play the um jason isbell custom telecaster there that pickup is kind of based off that right and i think i'm right in saying that the one in red has got longer pole pieces as well doesn't it it does have lapel pieces uh also the pickups i put in liv's guitar which are the we didn't hear alice the ron ellis pickups oh man we didn't hear that we didn't hear that [Music] yeah so longer pole pieces instead of sticking through the bottom of the the base um and it just gives it a bit more output and go yeah some people say sounds more stratey yeah the strat neck pickup obviously has a really particular thing but the fact that you can get really great jazz tones and clean tones and everything out of a telecast neck pickup it's certainly a lot more flexible um and usable than a lot of people give a credit for and i use mine all the time there's a mod that you can do actually if you find that the net pickup is a bit too dark you can remove the tone control from the neck pickup which i've done in my in red and in the 65 i've removed the token shelf for the next i i wonder if that's where it comes from because the bridge pickup is bright loud brash yeah it's actually the contrast between the two because you can you know on any tell you can get a great sound out of the naked pickup but it might be if you've optimized it for the bridge totally by the time you go to the neck it's just a bit too dark and therefore well maybe we could talk about it very briefly but loads and loads and loads of telly players will always play with a tiny bit of the tone rolled off right under bridge pickup yeah yeah and if you do that and you don't have the neck pickup connected to the control yeah the the balance between them is just awesome so much closer yeah than it would be otherwise yeah um maybe let's talk about that then there's a couple couple more kind of setting things i think are worth looking at one is the the tone pot on the bridge pickup the other is that in between setting yeah because it is such a classic sound when you hear it in its in the context in which it's most famous which i think is probably funk yeah yeah you know a lot of the james brown recordings and uh um parliament and you know a lot of the funk things that that in between telly thing is a big deal for that sort of sound um let me grab actually i grabbed the old one because it's not a sound i'd ever really used before until i got this guitar so bridge pickup [Music] neck pickup and then in between [Music] do [Music] [Music] wow [Music] this guitar has the funk it does that sound really well it does that sound beautiful yeah okay so let's just talk briefly one of the one of the big things about the telecaster is the intonation and it can be really challenging but you see how each pair of string the the e and the b string g and the d string the a and the e string they each share one of these bridge pieces and interestingly this one has very clearly been bent to try and get it to improve the the intonation is one of the bug bears of telly's in it now that's not to say that many awesome tele players down the years have managed just fine but they've usually done something like this where that middle one is bent and maybe that one will be bent too yeah um but of course you can get mods which is what i've done which maybe is why you thought about it because i've already changed these they are still three saddles but the string um intonation is improved on each saddle and you've done that on red as well i have yeah yeah so read you know my main guitar for years and years and i think told you we're doing like mr brightside i remember being up here trying to start the song [Music] and just no matter how hard i tried to internet get the guitar in tune it was it just sounded like a dog's dinner so i got some of these saddle pieces like titanium intonator saddle pieces and that soldered that problem out and i can hear on this guitar it's really good yeah primarily because of that but if i play the same thing on here oh there you go it's not too bad it's not too bad because because they've been bent do it on this one that's that sharp yeah yeah yeah so yeah people have been struggling with that thing for years the intonated saddles they sound fantastic you can like people have created bridges like the strat uh the teleplus thing had uh a different uh piece for each yeah well i mean this both the squires that we've had here today have us have a saddle per string yeah the g l asap has a saddle per string so it's it's only vintage style ones that still have the three the three saddles but you know just swapping them out for intonated saddle pieces can solve a whole lot of those problems yeah what else what else telly set up why zen is is problematic um not much really is this so it's so simple i i would say um you know like the difference between the maple neck guitars and the rosewood guitars is is stark and the way that you approach them if you're a country player for example and it you might want to use lighter strings a lower action and a compressor to get that you know real country thing if you're a heavy-hitting rock player you might want thicker strings on a higher action and a rosewood you know neck yeah that mid-range thing yeah i don't disagree with that at all yeah um but you know the if you're starting out you're looking at a telecaster and you're thinking okay which one do i buy think about if you wanna just an all-rounder telecaster um you know like the squire starting out fantastic sounding thing and that'll get you in the telly world but if you're if you're like a rock player that wants to do little bits and pieces like you know i can use red on anything yeah but it's such a great rock guitar there's something about a rosewood neck telecaster for the rock thing which is killer but if your thing is more country i would say have a look at the maple neck thing because they have that spank um it's almost like there's a compressor turned on them naturally yeah um and it is a generalization a bit like because the you know the the weight of the guitar what the body's made of the pickups all make a huge difference and i think in general i would agree with you yeah totally so just and so if you if the last thing we'll just i'm going to stick the compressor on with butters and so we can have a listen just to a couple of okay so bridge pickup no compressor so you can hear it grab the front of that note yeah big sign and then uh what that's really cool for like pedal steel type things [Music] do and that's mean you can obviously get a great country tone on any telecaster because that's part of that sound um but there's something you know traditionally those old black maple neck tellys have a certain thing about them that yeah that a lot of country players really like without doubt without doubt yeah um okay dan i think uh you should get some sounds up for the way that you approach telly okay because i think we you know the danger is when you do anything like this you sort of you stray into cliche you start talking about funk and you start talking about country and you start talking about great rock um bridge pickup type sounds pick your telly that you want to play dial in some sounds okay i think [Music] foreign you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] hello um [Applause] [Applause] [Music] uh ah [Music] [Applause] [Music] that was spectacular oh bless you thank you that was really really great actually i think that's one of the best sounds we've ever had in here we say that almost every week that was utterly killer that's two little amps look at that brilliant yeah how awesome yeah yeah wonderful yeah that that so that really skinny thin spanky skinny guitar it's just that you can only use for country not really not yet is it no not really no no not really no it's a flipping sledgehammer when it wants to be totally yeah totally very good yeah excellent well that was fun i hope you enjoyed that um you know yeah quick tour de force through a whole bunch of different tea style things did we play them all that's the question i think i think we did i think we did every every one yep good fabulous happy days excellent thank you so much for watching uh please subscribe if you haven't already subscribed also a massive thank you to our preferred retailers in the uk and europe is anderson's music of guildford in surrey uh in the in the australia the australia this pedal empire of brisbane queensland and there are some links in the description below yeah go to sweetwater.com click on the links buy stuff me and dan earn a bit off that it's very nice yeah indeed also a massive thank you to anyone that started that pedal show store.com and grabbed uh strings and pedals and hats and merch and all the good stuff lovely t-shirts t-shirts and stealthy black t-shirts like this yes indeed go there yes thank you so much have a fantastic day and we'll see you soon see you soon bye [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: That Pedal Show

Views: 207,799

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Id: 2TTeJtjJd5Y

Length: 55min 57sec (3357 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021