Oak Telecaster

This is a one piece oak body with a maple neck and fret board, so essentially it is made of two pieces of wood if you don’t include the skunk stripe, I was experimenting with tone, minimalism, and hard wood, I was told by a friend that guitars sounded better if they only had one pickup, something to do with the magnetic pull on the strings exerted by more pickups, so i made this out of a very very old piece of oak floor joist, I had to mill it down to find the wood below the rot and woodworm luckily it was thick enough.

Ok so why the selector switch if there’s only one pickup?

 

on the 3 way selector I have added capacitors linked to the tone knob and a treble bleed circuit on the volume pot, the pickup is hand wound with fiber bobbins, wax potted, alnico 5 poles, and encased in black string for a vintage look and sound.

the bridge saddles are brass and i’ve put string through ferrules, im really going for maximum brightness, the capacitors i’ve used give a blend of tones which are mixed through the tone knob, the brightest in what would be the bridge pickup position, theres a mullard mustard 1000uf and tropical fish, on there to roll some of the glass edge off and add some muddiness, which it needs because it is so bright, but it will cut through when it needs to.

Heres a video by Fender explaining the Treble bleed.

Zebrano Telecaster

This one came into being after a customer liked the way the oak tele sounded, cut using the same template but with some sculpting done around the bottom horn to suit the customers hand whilst playing on the 21st fret, and slightly different body and arm curvature, obviously finding a 500 year old piece of oak was a one off, but i had a solid lump of Zebra wood which was even harder than the oak,

This one has an even more elaborate capacitor mix selected by the customer which can imitate an acoustic, but the electrics are accessed from the rear via a rosewood cover plate, the selector switch is carved from an off cut of zebrano.

The Tung oil Finish takes a good three days to cure, and reveals the beauty of the solid zebrano body.