(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5256/5400744729_826505c7ef_z.jpg) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_atrocity/5400744729/in/set-72157625819361721/)
As some of you know I acquired a Philippe Dubreuille Telecaster a little while ago which may be the best guitar I've owned. It's incredibly light, the neck is really comfortable and the whole thing is very acoustically resonant. The only thing that I wasn't a 100% on were the pickups. As it's a guitar built by an independent luthier I didn't know what brand, if any, had been chosen but whatever they were, they seemed a little muffled almost, especially when the instrument obviously had so much life in it. So after a trip down to Feline Guitars today (Hello Feline, hello gwEm) I came away with a Blackguard Flat 50 neck pickup. I already had the companion bridge pickup from a previous Telemaster project.
This afternoon I performed a double pickup transplant, first to take the bridge Flat 50 out of the Telemaster (it now has a Fender cast off in it until I feel like getting something better), and then to swap out the pick ups from the Dubreuille. Upon extracting the pickups I found that they were Fender Custom Shop pickups. Well, the bridge one is as it has the sticker on the base, there were no identifying marks on the neck one. Anyway I've now installed the BKPs and the difference is like night and day.
The guitar has so much more sparkle and life to it now. I'd heard that the neck is very Strat like and so it's proved, there's plenty of SRV and Robin Trower in there to be mined. The bridge has more grunt and attitude than the one it replaces. It can do Albert Collins type icepick and with some slapback echo there's a lot of rockabilly goodness there too. With an 808 Tubescreamer pushing the amp there are also some great rock tones to be had. I think I probably need to play with the heights a little more to really fine tune things but so far it's proved a really great upgrade to enable an instrument that clearly had so much potential to really shine.
Now I just need to practice more to make myself worthy of it. :)