Tale of Two Teles

I had an opportunity to play a couple of Telecasters this past weekend in between shopping for shoes and lunch.

The first one I played was a Fender Deluxe Nashville Tele. A Tex-Mex™ Strat® pickup between two Tex-Mex Tele pickups and a five-way switch gave a lot of tonal possibilities. Oddly enough, the pickups weren't quite as hot as I expected but had a nice twangy sound with a good amount of sensitivity to pick attack and harmonics induced by light finger touches to the strings after picking.

The second Tele I tried was a Peavey Generation Triple/Single Ex Tele. Also sporting 3 single coil pickups and a five-way switch, this guitar played and sounded pretty good in its own right; especially for a sub $200.00 guitar. The bridge pickup didn't seem as hot as I would expect a bridge pickup to normally be but the neck pickup had a nice Tele twang.

Even though the Fender was used, it still had a price tag of about double the Peavey. I'm not sure it sounded twice as good or had hardware worth twice as much.

Here's a short vid on the Peavey Generation models:

Shielding My Strat

I had been planning this for a while and finally shielded my SE. I used metal tape that is normally used for duct work, etc. It's a bit tricky to work with but you get the hang of it.

The tricky part was in making sure adjacent pieces of tape had contact on the top metal portion and not just the sticky side since I don't know if the sticky side is conductive ... probably not.

The bottom of the pickguard had foil already and with the pots having tabs touching that foil which touches the little bit of overlap from my foil job in the cavity, I believe I've got ground throughout.

Guitarnuts is where I got the information and the idea about using the aluminum tape. The trick is to fold an edge over on the next adjacent piece so the conductive sides make contact with enough of the adhesive side available to hold it down well. You can put an extra bit on top of that to get a really firm contact.

I had considered using a screw, lug, and star washer into the bottom of the cavity and soldering a wire from one of my ground points to it, but as I've still got the stock pots and switch, I may do that next go round when I replace those units.