I'm a new member here, and although I had a japan nashville tele for a few years, I didn't really ever play it.
I consider myself a singer-songwriter, who over the past 10 years, has been playing acoustic guitar, mandolins, and Weissenborn Hawaiian slide guitar. Before that, I did play in a SRV/Clapton-ish blues band and I can hold my own enough in a blues jam situation.
I had a great tele player, Ross Martin, play lead guitar on my last CD. Now I have some local festival gigs in denver lined up and find myself wanting to play electric again.
So... I bought one of the ebay specials... a chambered spruce top cherryburst with lollar pickups. A great seller and a great guitar. Since the guitar sounds so great, and is chambered, and I already bring 4 instruments to gigs, I decided I could pull off the acoustic songs on the electric. I love the tone of the neck pickup. I love listening to Albert Lee and other tele players, but I don't seem to get the same appreciation when I play this tele on the bridge pickup.
So now I was thinking of customizing a tele to have an acousticy tele with a fishman acoustic bridge. A thinline seem to make sense...
I bought the
MIJ Tele TN-85SPL on ebay - another great seller(after quite a few very bad experiences with other sellers). I decided that I didn't care for the neck-humbucker, and I was hitting the chrome pickup cover on the tele middle pickup with my pick. So I have sent the pickgaurd off to have a tortoise style pickgaurd made with a standard tele neck pickup and a strat pickup in the middle like a nash tele - but moved it up closer to the neck pickup.
So now all of the questions that could probably go in many sections of this forum:
1. Fishman/Ghost Acoustic Piezo Pickups - I haven't really figured out how it could be wired up and who to have do it - and if I'd really be happy with it.
Do these go in easy and do the saddles change the electric tone much?
2. Pickups - I really like the lollars, but since I'm not exactly the greatest at soldering and was looking at the kinmans with the fancy electronics. It sounds like it could get rather expensive having someone wire up the fishman and a super switch, etc... I was looking a the kinman site and like the idea of the easier electronic wiring, the fancy switching capabilities. I wish I could get a tort pickup cover for these so I could hide the middle strat pickup a little...
Has anyone bought the whole set of kinmans with the solderless electronics? Is it that great and does it not detract from the tone without solid solder connections?
3. Now I'm thinking I'd like a rosewood fretboard - it just seems more like an acoustic guitar - what I'm used to. The neck on this guitar seems wider and a little beefier - which is closer to an acoustic and the fretboard overhangs the pickguard a little bit -
will a standard fender replacement neck fit? Is there a standard rosewood neck with the rosewood fretboard,wider nut/beefier neck available?
4. Then I got to thinking, wouldn't it be great if I had the spruce top on the thinline and butterscotch color - the ultimate guitar for me...
Should I just have one built?
So will this telemadness last forever? At this point, I thought maybe it makes more sense to just have this new butterscotchsprucetop/thinline/nashville/rosewood fretboard/fishman bridged, superswitching guitar custom built. My current decision is to keep piecemealing this thing together and try it out for a while and decide what I like and don't like first - and then consider building a guitar... If I keep all the parts, I could put it back to original and sell it later.
I played with the online telebuilder internet site and posted some pictures of my ideas HERE.
Sorry for the epic post... Had to get it out of my system with some other tele fanatics. Thanks to all for this forum and all of the great reference materials and opinions in the messages.
weissguy
June 28th, 2006, 03:02 AM
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