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Post subject: Single coils vs HBs through BJ
Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:40 pm
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Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2007 4:49 am
Posts: 31
Good evening

I've just discovered something rather interesting. This is gonna take a while to explain so please bear with me, but i'd really like someone to shed some light on it if possible.
I've currently got a project guitar on the go, using the components from a cheap Chinese knock-off Tele i got back in the summer. I went to a woodyard, got some suitable wood, bought a router and started work. However, as anyone who's ever made their own guitar will already know, cutting it out and routing the pick-up cavities creates an awful lot of sawdust which gets everywhere. Thus i was doing this outside, but couldn't get it finished before winter set in. I'm not really inspired to go outside in the cold and finish it off, and besides, it's not really the correct ambient conditions out there to get a good paint finish and i don't have a spray booth.
During the time i started this project i won an ebay auction for a pair of Fender 52RI Tele pick-ups, which duly arrived and looked authentically half a century old, but could've been any old rubbish. I had no choice but to leave positive feedback and hope they were the proper items.
Over last weekend it occurred to me that, if i couldn't finish my project until it warms up in the spring, i could buy a cheap Tele body so i could at least use my collection of parts and have another guitar to play. So, through the magic of ebay(again)i got a cheap sunburst body, which has been assembled into a cheap Chinese knock-off hybrid/mongrel Tele copy which may or may not have 52RI pickups in.
So here's the point; through my Blues Junior that thing(and that's about the only way to describe it - a thing)sounds incredible. I have no doubt the pickups are authentic now; it's full of twang and snap and bite, but has plenty of subtlety when the tone and volume pots are dialled back. The body i bought is a bit lightweight, the balance of the guitar is thrown out as a result, it's too thin, there's a quarter inch gap between the end of the neck and the neck pocket cos the holes are in the wrong place, nothing fits very well and the scale length's all wrong, yet it sounds great. Plays ok too cos i made sure the donor guitar had a good neck.
This then (at long last) is what i can't work out; my other three electrics all have humbuckers, and none of them sound particularly good through the BJ. My Tokai SG is ok when it's completely clean, but sounds mushy and unfocused beyond the break-up point, my Tom Delonge MIM Strat sounds bland and uninteresting, yet sounds like a flame-spitting monster through my Marshall and my Thinline Squier Tele sounds like the SG but not as good. All three display a general lack of clarity that makes me want to turn the BJ's treble control all the way up, and it still isn't enough, yet my mongrel Tele requires me to back it off cos theres too much treble. I've heard that Fender tube amps prefer single coils, and it must be true. How i wish i'd never sold my MIM standard sunburst Strat. I bet it would've got on just fine with the BJ.


Yours, puzzled but happy

Marge


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