The Telecaster. What some would call simple perfection or a blue
collar working man’s guitar is a 74 year old design. While there
have been many other iterations of it, the original standard modal
has had very few changes to the design by the original company who
launched it, Fender. As great as the guitar is, there are 3 major
design flaws that really effect it’s playing ability and should
have been modified on standards off the factory line many years ago. As much as I would
like to blame “boomers” or the stubborn allergenic-to-change
guitar community, truth is, most of us just want to emulate our
heroes who owned the same old guitars with their flawed designs. So
Fender keeps making them the same way. The good news is we can mod
these changes fairly cheaply and easily. Here are three mods that
should be standard on Teles to make them more playable.
1. Replacing the
Jack Plug Dish Thingy
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Worst ever.
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Seriously. What the
hell is this thing? It doesn’t appear on any other guitar in the
world for good reason. They should stop being made. You can’t fit
right angled jacks into it securely. It comes loose quickly, and
it’s a pain to tighten it back up. The whole thing is holding on
to a janky piece of metal wedged into the body. Just toss this thing
and buy a screw mounted cup type plug mount. You’ll never worry
about it again.
2. Intonating the
Three Saddle Bridge.
While some newer
models have the 6 saddle, fully intonatable bridges, the old style
bridges are made for 3 saddles. Each sharing two strings and usually
at a flat angle. This makes the higher positions on the guitar neck
become out of tune. I know some people say this is part of the
charm of a Tele, but I’d rather play in tune. No one listens to a
record and hears an out of tune guitar and says, “gee, what a great Tele.” You can buy compensated angled saddles out of a
variety of materials. They’re usually spot on with a little
adjusting.
3. Angling the
Selector Switch like a Stratocaster
This won’t bug
everyone, but if you switch pickups in the middle of a song then the
Tele will have you fumbling around trying. There is a reason the
Stratocaster has an angled pickup selector switch. You can use it
on the fly much quicker and easily. There are replacement control
plates which do this plus moving the volume knob back a bit to allow for
quick switching.
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24 years of corrosion under the old plate
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Runner ups.
The neck pickup. I
tried for years to like them. Tried many types of traditional
styles. I don’t like them. Personally I think replacing them with
anything is an improvement.
Top load strings on
the bridge. You can bend the strings better and it seems to be less
bright then the through body string option.
In Series wiring for the middle position. Despite playing a lot of funk, I hardy ever used the stock parallel wiring.
Until next time space cadets
