Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Pickups => Topic started by: Prawnik on March 21, 2009, 12:04:25 PM
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Since I have loved the album Presence by Led Zeppelin since I was a kid, after much meditation and many guitars built, I am building a guitar for that sound. The amps on that album mostly sound like Supro Thunderbolts pushed by a Fuzzface, but I am guessing here.
For those not in the know, Jimmy Page mostly recorded Presence not with a Les Paul or Tele, with a Lake Placid Blue 1963 Stratocaster. According to the guy who sold it to Jimmy, it was stone stock when Jimmy bought it.
However, the Strat I am building will have late 1969 specs down to the pickup routes, and will be Blue Ice metallic, not LP Blue.
It will have a veneer rosewood board and a Callaham trem and block, but approrpriate Fender Pat. Pending saddles. Unlike Jimmy, I prefer heavy strings and high action.
It will definitely have BKP vintage-style s/c pickups, but I am not sure which ones.
If this guitar were a maple board, I'd definitely choose Apaches. But since it's not, would Mother's Milk or Sultans' be a more appropriate choice for that kind of chiming brewtals?
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I believe Mother's Milks would be the right sort of "correct" pickup for a 63 strat (ie what would have been on JPs).
I didn't realise it was used for most of Presence - I know it's on things like In the Evening (I think I've even seen footage of him playing it on that).
Wow if I'd known all this years ago, it would have been so useful in convincing band members that strats were the thang... "JP (a name to command their respect in those days) is a strat-player, so shut the f up boys... :lol:"
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Yup, you can hear Jimmy use the bar on "Candy Store Rock", "For Your Life" and other tracks from that album, so it can't be any of his Lesters. Most of the other guitars are also clearly Strats.
Although Presence was JP's favorite Zeppelin album, it also never sold as well as their earlier efforts. A very different vibe from what the fans wanted.
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I imagine a veneer board has less effect on the tone than a slab board so perhaps Apaches might still be ok, but I'm willing to go with Andys suggestion of Mother Milks as he's much more of a single coil guy than me :)
Right, I'm off to listen to Prescence now 8)
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By veneer board shall I understand that on with radius on both surfaces of the fingerboard??
Never really understood this kind of building... :?
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By veneer board shall I understand that on with radius on both surfaces of the fingerboard??
Never really understood this kind of building... :?
Yeah, the maple of the neck has a radius under the fretboard and a thin veneer of rosewood is glued on, instead of a flat piece of rosewood glued on and then radiused.
Check out this link about 1/3 down to see the difference. https://www.musikraft.com/store.php?pg1-cid52.html (https://www.musikraft.com/store.php?pg1-cid52.html)
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Thanks :D
Was what I had in mind...
But keep don't understanding why make on this way :lol: more difficult and won't have much tonal add from the rosewood...
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I think most people choose rosewood or maple by looks rather than tone, plus you could argue that with a slab board there's less rosewood under the E strings than the G and D, whereas a veneer board is more equally balanced... maybe 8)
I agree that it looks more expensive to make unless the cost of rosewood outweighed the cost of labour at the time.
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Thanks :D
Was what I had in mind...
But keep don't understanding why make on this way :lol: more difficult and won't have much tonal add from the rosewood...
I do it because I do my best to copy my beloved early CBS guitars as closely as I can. On the late'68-early'69 hardtail Strat I built, I actually did a veneer maple-on-maple board, as would be correct from 1966 through early 1969 (maple boards were optional at that time).
Fender did it probably to save on rosewood. Leo Fender was nothing if not cost-conscious.
Supposedly, the reason Fender changed from maple to rosewood boards had nothing to do with tone. It came about because Leo Fender was watching a variety show on TeeVee one evening around 1958. The musical act was playing Fender guitars. Leo liked cowboy music and he liked seeing his instruments on TeeVee, but he didn't like the fact that the guitars' maple boards showed wear spots big enough to be visible even on the tiny black-and-white sets of the day. That did not, in his opinion, make Fender guitars look good.
So Leo set to changing his guitars' necks to something that did not show wear so much.
Remember, back in 1958, musical acts wanted to look sharp, not worn at the elbows. This was the era when most popular music acts wore matching suits and did little synchronized dance steps while they played. Musicians wanted guitars that looked shiny, modern, new.
The idea of "relicing" a perfectly new guitar to make it look old and beat-up would have earned you a free trip to Bellevue in those days.
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I believe Mother's Milks would be the right sort of "correct" pickup for a 63 strat (ie what would have been on JPs).
I didn't realise it was used for most of Presence - I know it's on things like In the Evening (I think I've even seen footage of him playing it on that).
Wow if I'd known all this years ago, it would have been so useful in convincing band members that strats were the thang... "JP (a name to command their respect in those days) is a strat-player, so shut the f up boys... :lol:"
Oh, and pregunta mas estupida, but what would set Mother's Milk tonally apart from Sultans? I know that the magnets are different, but how does that result in a different sound?
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^ You got me on that one - I'm afraid don't know anything about the Sultans.
(And my Mother's Milk knowledge is "hear-say" based on what I've learnt on here! :D)
So I'll be quite interested to see what responses you get...
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Interesting, so these double radius was the first roseW from fender? violin fingerboards are double radious too, should be from were it came...
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violin fingerboards are double radious too, should be from were it came...
I was wondering if it might be something like that (but I didn't know whether violins were like that or not :lol:)
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Interesting, so these double radius was the first roseW from fender? violin fingerboards are double radious too, should be from were it came...
No, Fender rosewood board were "slab-style" through mid-1962. After that, they went to veneer boards. Rosewood boards remained veneer-style (probably to save dough) through the 1970's. Maple boards were no longer offered by that point, although a few made it out the door as extra-special custom orders.
By the time maple boards were an "official" option in 1966, Fender was making them from two pieces of maple, presumably because not many were being made and that way they could share more components with their much more common rosewood bretheren. As maple boards became a more popular option, Fender returned to the one-piece necks sometime in mid-1969, probably to save on labor costs, as the veneer is more work.
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I've read that with veneer boards (maybe particularly on refretted ones) the fret slots can cut all the way through the rosewood, so the rosewood contributes very little to the tone because in effect it's cut into 22 separate little bits.
So as gingataff said, maybe you could go with Apaches after all?
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Having a few strats I can say that the veneer boards do have a bit more presence than the slab boards (however the slab boards have a great tone). My 57 sounds brighter than either but not as fat as the 61 and the 63 sounds somewhere in between (which might be what you would expect). The 57 also has Apache's which do imrove it's sound over the DiMarzio's that someone had put on it before I got it. The 63 has original pickups and the 61 has one original, one original with a BK rewind and one BK AV Apache.
The difference between the Mother's Milks and Sultans is AV magnets vs AII magnets really, I like the Sultans in the middle and neck slightly more than the Mothers, however I only have both sets in HSS strats, so I can't tell you how they are in the bridge. The Sultans sound a little more smooth than the MM's with a little less push to the sound.
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The difference between the Mother's Milks and Sultans is AV magnets vs AII magnets really, I like the Sultans in the middle and neck slightly more than the Mothers, however I only have both sets in HSS strats, so I can't tell you how they are in the bridge. The Sultans sound a little more smooth than the MM's with a little less push to the sound.
Sorry for the brief thread hijack, but that's the first time it's dawned on me that the Sultans are AII. I like the tone of Duncan Alnico IIs, but I'm sure a BKP version would be nicer... hmmm.... that's got me thinking.
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Having a few strats I can say that the veneer boards do have a bit more presence than the slab boards (however the slab boards have a great tone). My 57 sounds brighter than either but not as fat as the 61 and the 63 sounds somewhere in between (which might be what you would expect). The 57 also has Apache's which do imrove it's sound over the DiMarzio's that someone had put on it before I got it. The 63 has original pickups and the 61 has one original, one original with a BK rewind and one BK AV Apache.
The difference between the Mother's Milks and Sultans is AV magnets vs AII magnets really, I like the Sultans in the middle and neck slightly more than the Mothers, however I only have both sets in HSS strats, so I can't tell you how they are in the bridge. The Sultans sound a little more smooth than the MM's with a little less push to the sound.
Well, looking at the issue bass-ackwards, would a stock 1963 Strat have AII or AV magnets? What about a 1969 Strat?
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The main difference between the 63 and 69 pickups would have been the number of turns in the wire and the base being grey not black. There seems to be nothing that lists what the magnets were each year (though they usually say that the magnets varied due to the cobalt percentage being different). However the real man to speak to on this would be Tim.
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The main difference between the 63 and 69 pickups would have been the number of turns in the wire and the base being grey not black. There seems to be nothing that lists what the magnets were each year (though they usually say that the magnets varied due to the cobalt percentage being different). However the real man to speak to on this would be Tim.
Somewhat OT, but it is my theory that the number of turns in Fender pickups really varied more from individual pickup to individual pickup rather than from year to year.
Maybe there were broader trends in manufacture, but from what I can tell about how Fender operated it wasn't like they decided "OK, for the 1963 model year we will produce Telecaster bridge pickups with 7735 turns of wire to get a more Bakersfield sound. Esquires will get 7300 turns to save on valuable wire."
Sometimes you see citations to Seymour Duncan's website where average numbers of winds for Strat pickups for a given year are listed, but those figures are just that, averages.
Correct me if I am wrong, this is just my theory.
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For those of you who care, after weeks of meditation, prayer and fasting, I pulled the trigger on a set of Mother's Milks. Gray forbon, vintage stagger, no RW/RP.
Photos will be posted on completion.
Breastesses not included.