As you may remember from a NAD before christmas, I came to an arrangement with Andrew W to get his Telemaster from him. It seemed like it'd make an interesting project, which we finally got finished yesterday with some awesome results and some not quite as awesome results.
What we've done is rout rout a nice hole where there once was a tele pup and have dropped in a TV Jones Powertron Plus and Tele Sevalas (really) bridge. Which I can only discribe as bloody awesome. It's BFG in a pup. Brilliant!
What didn't work quite so well was that, because it had a pup selector, I didn't want to screw around with caps to get different tones. I really wanted a real front pup. So underneath the pickguard is hidden a SD mini humbucker from a Firebird. Two reasons for this. One the pickguard Andrew made is bakelite and cutting it for the pup would have been a complete mare. The second is that I really like it's esquire vibe.
Which brings the problem, how to do adjust the output of the front pup to balance them? Answer, there's a teeny tiny SHO stuck in there and a 9v battery. Which has worked, but it's created a bit of a hiss and an odd result when the pair of them are selected together. I suspect it's mixing essentially what is an active neck pup now with a passive bridge. Maybe a buffer would sort it out on the front pup? Dunno, probably not. It works, sorta, as it sounds like a really beefy single coil, and has some interesting tones. But it's not quite perfect. Still, I prefer it to the different caps on the switch to mess with the tone of a single pup so it'll stay.
Finally, for Ian P, domed knobbage!
