Stratocaster vs. Telecaster

whoa - I assume that's not stock/you had it done custom? I'd love to have benders on my eventual extremely nashville tele. The strap hook ones look fun.

haha I will Spottie didn't know what the protocol was for actual Teles

ma - it was already installed, bought it off Reverb, was only $450 and I never see b bender guitars for cheap

the mechanism itself is a mystery, it's probably closest to what Hipshot does for benders but I haven't been able to find another guitar with this particular bridge

it's definitely not stock

yeah I mean that was semi-rhetorical, clearly that is some homebrew stuff there

it could be a one-off someone made, my one worry is if it breaks or gets way out of wack who's going to be able to service it?

but at the end of the day, it's still a nice Tele so I could always go back to a regular bridge

does anyone have opinions on replacement pickups for a Squier? worth it? any particular brands/models?

Yeah I've seen the smaller ones that are on the bridge and I guess you operate with the palm of your hand or something, but I've never seen one like that.

does anyone have opinions on replacement pickups for a Squier? worth it? any particular brands/models?

The bender design I am familiar with is an internal mechanism linked to the strap button, so you just press down on the neck.

That crook-of-the-elbow design is intriguing but I know I would never be able to use it accurately

I don't think I'll be a hot shit nashville guy but my hope is that it could be cool in a non country context, like using looper/delay soundscape shoegaze type stuff? Maybe?

Finally got the long lost 93 American strat back and had it set up. It plays and sounds “good” but I still have a love-hate relationship with that glassy Strat tone. This was one of the better tones I got out of it on my first run. It’s a bit blues bar band for my liking.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQUJbdLDEDA/?utm_medium=copy_link

UMS it looks like a Timara bender or a copy thereof? https://www.timarastringbenders.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=bg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKmW0ptzxs

Man alive, I getcha, but for me the glassiness is the whole point. In that clip (fun!) where you're on the bridge pickup, it sounds almost Telecasterish. Which is certainly a way to approach the instrument but for me it shines most up in the neck position, in a Gilmour stylee.

Yeah, I was definitely going for that. I’ve heard some country guys do the almost-tele thing on a strat but it’s usually disappointing. Otherwise though I feel like the Strat has such a strong tonal personality that it’s very hard not to either sound like you’re doing faux-Gilmour or faux-srv or faux-knopfler or faux-Hendrix.

mattkkkk - thanks so much for finding that! it's definitely the same design. that's actually comforting I was thinking what if something goes bad with it and I need a replacement part

No worries! Looking at the action it seems like the B would be bent by tucking the elbow in to the body, but it might be possible to bend the G by pulling up on the neck (if the G arm is resting in the crook of your elbow)?

Starting to warm to the strat a little tbh, although it's really easy to devolve into very smooth, buttery blues solos with a crying-looking-out-the-window-of-my-private-plane vibe

maybe give Adam Granduciel a buzz?

you might be right about the g bender, it hadn't occurred to me to move the neck I was trying to "pull" it with my arm which is awkward

right now I'm just using the b bender which is already a lot to get my head around

can anyone who’s worked on guitar electronics help me diagnose something?

over the weekend i replaced the volume and tone pots in my 72 thinline with 1 meg pots. i put everything back together today and the results were odd. guitar works, pickup selector works, no weird noises, but....both knobs don’t do anything. i assume the sound i am getting is wide open, no pots active.

my soldering skills are not amazing but i can follow a wiring diagram and the fact that i am getting sound suggests that everything is connected. the way it is wired is that the selector switch and tone pot are soldered to one lug of the volume pot, the output jack is connected to the second lug, and the tone capacitor is connected to the third lug.

help! my powers of logic and reasoning are not telling me what the problem is.

Sounds like you might have wired the pickup switch output to the "top of the pot" and likewise the output jack, somehow. Any chance you bridged between two lugs with a little solder?
A photo would probably show the problem.

This is the wiring on my Greco Deluxe, should be the same as a Thinline setup.
https://i.imgur.com/VKpukh3.jpg

thanks matt, that's a good thought that would at least describe what i am experiencing. i don't *think* i did that but it's totally possible. i am probably going to wait a bit before cracking it open again--it's functional with nice new strings so i'll defer the frustration.

the thinline is only one tone and one volume, mercifully for my shaky soldering hands.

https://i.imgur.com/GmYRWfC.jpg
For each volume pot (bottom two in this pic): pickup wire (braided shield) comes to the pot; braid is grounded on case, hot wire goes to "top" of the pot (one end of the scale, the right hand lug here). "Bottom" of the pot (left hand lug here) is grounded to the case by bending the tag and soldering. For the wire to the selector, the hot goes to the pot wiper (picks somewhere between the top and bottom of the pot range, i.e. volume from full to nothing, and the shield goes to the case for grounding.
For the tone pots (top two here): the "top" of the volume pot (right hand lug) comes to the wiper of the tone pot through a capacitor (i.e. only high freqs come to the tone pot). The "top" of the tone pot is grounded to the case. So by turning the pot, the amount of high-freq going to ground is altered.
The output jack is wired to the switch which is taking its feeds from both volume pots.

oops I see, well the setup for the thinline will be pickups to switch first, then the output of the switch coming in like the braided wires to one volume pot, the output jack coming off the volume pot like the plastic wire above, and the tone pot wired more-or-less the same.
The uninsulated straight wires are just joining all the cases of the pots to ground by the way.

yup, exactly. this is what i followed: https://www.fmicassets.com/Damroot/Original/10002/013-7402B_SISD.pdf

baffled me at first but I think I get it: the pickup goes into the top of the volume pot *and* the top of the tone pot. The bottom of the volume pot is grounded to the case. The tone pot is a varying resistor between the bright signal and a bleed cap which takes treble frequencies away down to the ground at the bottom of the volume pot. So the tone pot is sucking away the treble from the top of the volume pot by some amount, and the output jack is coming from the volume wiper to select the level of this treble-sucked signal.
Excuse the lengthy screed I am just trying to work it out for myself!
In that case if the leg of the volume pot is not grounded to the case (right hand leg on the diagram, could be a dry joint or missed the connection on the diagram like I did at first) then it'd be full output and no tone control all the time, I think.

ahhhh interesting. did not think about it like that. i did note that connection but that one could very well be a bad joint.

or it could also be that the case of the vol pot is not grounded, but that seems unlikely given the number of ways it could be grounded.

yeah, the fact that there is no weird hum suggests to me that everything is grounded. i did a test plugin before screwing it down and putting strings on and there was some serious hum--sure enough one of my grounds to the volume pot had come undone. getting everything secure and *then* having to stuff it back into the available routing space is a pain in the ass.

Can anyone tell me more about the Fender "noiseless" pickups you see on a lot of higher end recent telecasters?

I tried a Mexican Nashville Custom yesterday - it played beautifully, but I felt like somethin was a little off about the pickups. Not sure if I was imagining it, but maybe a bit thin sounding? First I tried it through a Fender Deluxe Reverb. Can't say it sounded bad, it was just REALLY clean, and like I said, maybe a bit thin, lacking some body. Then I tried through one of those 68 Custom Deluxe Reverbs (because I have the 68 Custom Princeton at home). It sounded like ASSSSSSS. Then I tried it through a little Supro, and that was probably the best sound I got, especially with the amp cranked.

For comparison I tried a regular Player telecaster, and although I didn't like the way it played (possibly partly because it has been languishing in a Sam Ash for too long), I though the pickups sounded more like your classic fender tele pickups. But not sure if that's just because I'm used to standard issue fender single coil pickups. So many rave reviews about the noiseless pickups so maybe I have unconscious bias against the newness of them.

(tbc, the Mexican Nashville Custom had noiseless pickups).

My Stratocasters have had the SCN pickups and I like them. But then I like cleans.

Anyone have any experience with either the Fender 75th anniversary tele or the vintera road worn 50s tele? Both of these seem like they might be in my sweet spot of having the more classic “twang” tele sound, no noiseless pickups, and not insanely priced (and the “wear” on the roadworn I’m looking at is pretty minimal, which I prefer if there’s going to be any at all).

I think with most Fenders you will get something that will work, they might need to be setup, but in general they don't have too many total clunkers. Hard saying now, but I think with any name brand guitar you are better off if you got options with stores going and finding a used one in many ways unless there is one you just have to have.

Any tele marked 50s style usually will have a bigger U shaped neck, which to me is a good thing. I don't like yer skinny modern C neck myself, I want a ballbat neck myself.