What if your Tele turned into a Strat ...

Anytime I see a post about a Tele becoming a Strat I get nauseous.

You see my Father in Law and his brother bought matching 1956 White Guard Teles when they were young men. They both wanted Strats but the music store only had Teles in stock. So they both walked out with '56 White guards and a Fender Deluxe Amp.

A year or two later my FIL's brother took a hack saw to his '56 and cut in an upper horn. I saw the guitar and it was a pretty poor job on the cut out. I can't just stop thinking that he totally ruined the value of that guitar, but they were kids and in 1958 those Teles were not worth too much!

 

Is your FIL’s brother Mike Bloomfield?

 

John Hall lawsuit model.

 

My Tele Pluses are the closest I’d want my Tele to become a Strat....heck, the middle pickups are even Strat pickups,

 

I love Teles and Strats. And while I enjoy them as originally designed, neither were designed by "GOD" and thus, neither are necessarily "perfect".

Thus, I very much enjoy various tweaks and mods to make the guitars even better suited to my preferences. This includes different pickup options, different control layouts, etc. My Teles have a wide variety of different configurations and I love them like that.

This isn't limited to Fenders either. I recently converted my Gibson ES-339 to sort of a Gretsch, by installing TV Jones TV-HT pickups and changing the wiring scheme. Now, rather than thinking I should sell the 339, I'm thrilled with it's sound and will keep it.

 

No thanks!

I prefer a Tele to be a Tele, and a Strat to be a Strat.


A tele with a trem, humbuckers or more than 2 singles just seems sooooo wrong to me. I call them Tele shaped guitars. I get that others feel differently, and to each his own.

Same with TelePauls/LesTele's !!

 

To be fair, it wasn't Bloomfield who hacked that guitar up, it was John Nuese who bought it from Mike.

 

Wrong last name but that is really close to what I saw. He tried to stain the cut out horn to match the white washed original finish and it looked more painted in that spot than stained. Their guitars had the white washed stain that was almost translucent.

 

If I could get my hands on three hard-tail Strats with really nice bridges, I would probably sell everything but my Gretsch's. Maybe!

Admittedly there's no one guitar that does it all.

Most all of us having had exposure to many types of guitars understand and accept that truth, but it would be nice to just have one that could do everything you wanted to do on it.

 

Yeah, and he only did that because he was left handed and wanted upper fret access. Not because he was trying to make it look like a Strat.

 

If my tele became a strat I'd say it was having a midlife crisis

 

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If you spend time swapping back and forth between a Tele and a Strat ... you'll find:
The Strat's saddles and neck sit more to the right than the Tele both when sitting down (location of the thigh cut) and standing (locations of the strap buttons). This sets up so you are more likely to pick a Tele nearer the bridge pickup and saddles than the Strat and get more twang. However, due to the sit/hang location of the bridge combined with the Strat's volume knob in the way, players tend to pick between the middle and neck pickups for a more round tone and further less like a Tele.

One of the things I noticed about Hendrix playing live ... he had that Strat upside down with a short guitar strap so those righty controls were out of his way, but he had no volume knob in the way like every normal Strat player has by the high strings. Wide open playing range. This gave him the ability to play his Strat more like a Tele gets played -- all over, and gave him a much wider tone range than the typical Strat player gets to do.

My Strats I either block or deck the trems. Too much potential for distraction with that tremolo. On my one Strat I'm moving the volume to the first tone location and getting a stacked pot so I can have tone on the tip and the Armstrong Blender I use on the ring.

.

 

I have nine Strats and six Teles, and my Nashville is perfect to fill in for either.

 

‘If six were 9’?

Nashville. My favourite Tele.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I would Love a Tele with a Strat style bridge/vibrato on it, and please don't tell me to get a Tele with a Bigsby, 'cause a Bigsby is nowhere near as good.

 

I like Teles and strats. I like strats with vintage to not-too-hot buckers in the bridge or hot tele-ish sounding singles in the bridge. Neck has got to be a vintage single. Or singlish sounding noiseless.

I like Teles with stock vintage or hot bridge pickups or a tele-size bucker in the bridge - again, not too hot. Neck has got to be brighter, with Strat-like tendencies, but it doesn’t have to sound exactly like a strat. I don’t like buckers or dark syropy tele neck pickups.

So to sum up - I would like a guitar with two pickups - tele like in the bridge and Strat like in the neck with a 2-point modern, non-locking Strat trem. Shaped like a tele or Strat - doesn’t matter. I like Teles and strats

 

I think I could imagine the line between a Strat and Tele blurred!