Help me find my ultimate guitar

  • Thread starter Thread starter thebigcheese
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Here is your ultimate guitar,but it belongs to me.
 

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What is that cover for? I would think that would make it awfully hard to palm mute.
 
thebigcheese said:
What is that cover for? I would think that would make it awfully hard to palm mute.
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That's why you seldom see them, everyone takes them off.

The Tele isn't my favorite, but it has a unique sound you can get no other way. For the "Bonanza" sound and for reggae ska stuff it has no equal, and you can see it's range when Jimmy Page uses one. Albert Lee is insane.
 
Since you say you like Telecasters:

The G&L ASAT Bluesboy is a tele style guitar with a humbucker in the neck position. It was among Leo Fender's last designs. The L in G&L stands for Leo Fender and G&L was Leo's last company. The Bluesboy is available as a thinline as well. The ASAT models sound different from Teles.

G&L guitars are cost competitive with Fenders. They are a much smaller operation and the craftsmanship is (IMHO) better than Fender.

The pickups look the same but are not. The G&L design uses a stronger magnet and fewer turns. (fewer turns = reduced hum)

I would encourage you to try one and see what you think before you make a decision.
 
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Just so we are clear about this. The Telecaster is the Stradivarius of rock.
 
With three like this you have all bases covered ;)

:cool:
 

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muttley600 said:
Hey aus.. good to see you round here again. Did that project for the archtop get rolling in the end?
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Mutt,

I thought you may have commented on the refined Englishman (my Eggle) between the two brash Americans :D.

The archtop project started but preoccupations with the day job have been making it frustratingly slow, I'll keep you informed as things significant take place ;)

Chris :cool:
 
I'll need to find somewhere to try out the G&L. GC doesn't seem to stock them, but there may be a couple at a local store around here. It's not necessarily the Telecaster that I'm interested in, it's just the general sound of somewhere between a Gibson and a Fender, perhaps leaning more toward Fender. I'm actually not that fond of how the Telecaster looks. The Jaguar is pretty cool looking, but the controls are just too much for me.

Ugh. There are so many guitars to choose from, and many of them I can't find in stores around here. Why does finding the perfect guitar have to be so difficult?
 
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thebigcheese said:
I'll need to find somewhere to try out the G&L. GC doesn't seem to stock them, but there may be a couple at a local store around here. It's not necessarily the Telecaster that I'm interested in, it's just the general sound of somewhere between a Gibson and a Fender, perhaps leaning more toward Fender. I'm actually not that fond of how the Telecaster looks. The Jaguar is pretty cool looking, but the controls are just too much for me.

Ugh. There are so many guitars to choose from, and many of them I can't find in stores around here. Why does finding the perfect guitar have to be so difficult?
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Check out a Jazzmaster then maybe?
 
Zaphod B said:
A Les Paul fitted with P90 pickups (such as an R4 or R6) will get you spank and twang, darker than a Fender, though, with all the sustain you'd expect from a Les Paul. The neck pickup will give you a very robust "woody" sound. But you can't get that Strat quack that comes from the out-of-phase pickup switch positions.
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FWIW, the 2nd and 4th positions on a 5 position Strat switch do not put anything out of phase. The switch just puts the bridge and middle pickups or neck and middle pickups in parallel. At some point Fender started putting a RWRP (reverse wound reverse polarity) pickup in the middle position to gain some humbucking benefit in positions 2 and 4, but the signal from all three pickups is the same polarity. RWRP winding flips the phase 180 degrees twice (once for the winding and once for the direction of the magnets) so that its signal is the same orientation as a standard wound pickup.

Also FWIW, I have a Strat and a Les Paul. I use the guitar that has the sound I want at the time. There are guitars out there that attempt to get both a Gibson dual bucker sound and Fender single coil sound, but IMO they end up doing neither as well as the original.
 
Walt-Dogg said:
Check out a Jazzmaster then maybe?
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I might. The single coil pickups were turning me off a bit, but I might check it out anyway. I mean, plenty of guitarists get by with single coils, so there must be some way of managing the hum for recording.

Speaking of pickups, how much would changing the pickups in my guitar change the tone? Someone had suggested earlier that I could just change the pickups if I wanted a different sound, but would that really get me more twang? My guitar, at least as is, sounds kinda dark and... maybe muddy isn't the right word, but it definitely lacks the clarity and definition of a really nice Les Paul. But it seems like even some of the cheaper Les Pauls have that problem, too. They all look so identical, though, so I have to imagine it's something more than just the pickups, though those do appear to be different.

Edit: Mainly I'm asking because pickups are expensive enough that if I got those, I couldn't also afford a guitar, at least not for a while, so I'd want to make sure they'd do what I want. Though The Paul could probably use new pickups anyway so it sounds more Les Pauly.
 
mshilarious said:
The largest tonal shift from a humbucker is not the bucking of hum, it's from the doubling of output (and thus output impedance).
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That's some of the difference. The rest of it comes from the humbucker's picking the signal off two different places on the strings. The harmonic content is slightly different at the two spots, so some frequencies interfere constructively while others interfere destructively.
 
Huh, interesting discovery today. When I turn my amp way up, my guitar sounds much more like I want it to, so I guess the tone is in there somewhere, just not with the amp quiet. That's kind of annoying... I might put new pickups in at at some point, but I'll probably stick with humbuckers for it. I'm thinking that I might just get a Strat and deal with having two guitars instead of just one perfect one (since that doesn't seem to exist).

I've read that these days, there isn't much difference between the Mexican and American Strats in terms of quality. I can get a used American Strat for probably about $800, but I could also get a brand new Mexican Strat for $500 and spend the extra to get those Fralin split-blade pickups to get rid of some hum.

Edit: Or I could go with the G&L S-500, which looks like a pretty sweet guitar at just the right price. I really like natural finishes, so that's a nice bonus. I'll have to head up to the local store this week and check one out. They are listed as a dealer, so hopefully they'll have it.
 
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