Telecaster

Hey Steve! Sam here. I am thinking about grabbing a telecaster. The tones that you get out of it are really magical and it’s been cool to see it fall into your line up. Are there any tele builders that you’d recommend? I’ve been looking at Danocasters. I know yours is a Wysocki, but they’re pretty hard to snag. Also, do you have any recommendations for good saddles and pickups for teles? Thank you!
SK
18 Jul 2023 10:58pm
I’m relatively new to Telecaster, so I’ve got more questions than answers myself. I’ll tell you what I know tho!

I’ve played Dano and Nash Tele’s as well as the Wysocki and they all seem excellent to me but pretty divergent too. It’s as if qualities that make one Tele good can be entirely absent in another good Tele.

So I guess that was my first beginner realization: there isn’t “one good one”.

I’ve been thru a couple pickup swaps, ended up back where I started with the Jim Rolph Broadcaster style pickups Wysocki installed originally. The other stuff I tried, stock Fender neck and “Nancy” bridge were darker and gainier than the Rolph’s, and I had arguably a better N+B sound with stock neck and Rolph bridge, but overall the Broadcaster set seemed more of a piece. Better match to the guitar and PU to PU.

Ordinarily I’d go stock Fender whenever possible but in this case the 60’s neck PU I have was not the better choice for the rest of the guitar.

I went thru a bunch of saddles too, ultimately decided one set sounded way better than all the rest but I don’t know who made them!

I asked Jim Weider to send me some orphan saddles to try and my faves were from that pile. I described them to him but he didn’t recall either. Brass, flat bottom, relatively large (not skinny) height adjustment hex head’s, and stamped E-B, G-D, A-E under the slanted saddles. They might be RI Fender. Dunno. .

The good news is the one thing that made the biggest diff is completely obvious: top-load bridge plate! Huge improvement in compliance and sound for me. No string tree on the Wysocki, I think that helps too.

The bad news at this point is the string gauge and brand I prefer will not intonate with the saddles I like. I’m gonna have to do some cutting and bending. Hope I don’t fk it up. .

The strings I like are Pyramid flat wound 11’s with a Thomastic .018 plain G instead of the flat wound 20 or 22 that comes with the set. Sounds great, feels great, impossible to tune.

Anyway, that’s a long way to go for “try a top loader”, but that’s about all I got!

The wiring is super simple, one volume control for each pickup and a three way switch. I tend to leave the pots alone on that guitar when swapping pickups so probably 250K pots.That’s it, doggy ‘70 something Strat, still doing its best to be useful. : )
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