What is it about Teles?

I wish I did but I can tell you that in the last five years I have been exclusively a Telecaster player and I've owned three of them now, waiting for my fourth which will be a La Cabronita with a single P90 in the bridge.

Whenever I mix a live gig, I know a tele will sit right. It just seems to work better than anything else in at least this room.

Interesting. I thought correlated the solid body with attack.

I meant to type that I never equated a solid body with attack.

Think of it like a kick drum.... the tighter you tune it the more full range attack it has, same principle. The wood also has a lot to do with how certain Teles sound. Some are ash, some are alder, IMO the northern ash tends to be a little fuller with more sustain, the swamp ash is more snappy and brighter. The alder tends to be a little scooped, but we are kind of splitting hairs with that, the pickups are really important on a Tele if you want it to sound right. 

My Tele is swamp ash, and is a lighter guitar. I chose that because because I like a brighter guitar, I also have the vintage electronics and Mojotone Broadcasters in it, so if I want it to sound heavy I can just pull back on the tone knob, if I want bright and snappy I just turn all the knobs up, it's a great guitar that was a custom kit. I've got a thread in here on it, if you're ever looking to do a new one you should check into that route. I built a guitar that would had costed me around 3k from fender for just over $700. And it's freaking gorgeous. 

I bet a Tele with my new Fender 68 Deluxe would be very Mike Campbell-esque though! Damn you RGO!

Check into PRS if you ever decide to go that route, give them a shot a long side the Les. I've got a PRS, and it's similar, but feels a bit more modern and is really versatile. 

Yeah, assuming typical two single coil pickups, but reverse wound and reverse polarity. Mine are wired so you get the bridge alone, then both pickups in parallel (I think), then the neck alone, then both pickups in series (I think - I may have the series/parallel bit backwards).

When the switch is in the second position it is pretty close to humbucking. In the fourth position it is louder, more aggressive mids and still cuts out a good portion of the single coil buzz, but not as much as the other (second) position running through both pickups. 

I don't think you lose anything by wiring it this way over a typical three way, and you get the extra tone option. If you played totally clean all the time, might not be worth pursuing. I also don't know if the fourth position adds more noise if the pickups aren't RWRP - that might be a concern too.

Cheers,
Geoff

I follow. When reading, I remembered a builder speaking about this. Very cool. I think he had one of the positions with the pups out of phase for a Strat-ish thing.

I have 6 or 7 Telecasters here. One is a custom 12 string I built back in 1979 with a birdseye maple body and a Fender Shennadoah 12 string neck from the late 1960's. That has custom wound pickups done back in 1979 by a little known fellow in Santa Barbara called Seymour Duncan. Those are wound to 2k ohms each with a resonant frequency of 32k hz. It has active treble/bass EQ built in.

The rest are 6 stringers, hollow, solid, mohagany, maple, ash and alder and my Let It Be solid rosewood. Each are set up with a preamp/boost circuit fitted with a hum nulling circuit. A dummy coil is fitted under the strings and a trim pot nulls out the hum to -80 db. This way I get classic Tele tones and no noise. The pickups are all stock windings. One tele is a Jim Adkins's hollow/Les Paul special design with P-90 pickups.

Since I love Hendrix style levels and feedback, I modified the mechanics to handle those SPL's. The bridge pickup's steel plate is gone, replaced by lock washers and latex rubber hose for the springs. The bridge is secured with silicone glue to prevent howling at high volumes. The innards are all lined with adhesive copper foil tape and grounded. The string ground is replaced with a .022uf cap to prevent lethal shocks.

There is no buzz nor hum when your hands are removed from the strings. The preamps will drive very long cables without losses and will even drive a set of headphones. They all look stock on the outside.

Well, a lot of Tele bridge pickups are a little microphonic as well. Possibly because of the steel plate? Maybe that's part of it too.

Jim, do you think removing the plate changes the tone at all or makes the pickups less microphonic? Or just let you wind em up louder?

Cheers,
Geoff

The bridge is part of it, I use the old style folded edge bridges, those are cold rolled hard steel. Saddles can be rolled smooth steel or knurled, I prefer smooth as string bending can cause the string angle to rub and loose sustain. A also have one with brass saddles, a far less twangy tone. New models now use a flat bridge plate and six Strat vintage style saddles.

The steel plate used to mount the bridge pickup spreads the magnetic field out underneath the pickup. It does little to effect the tone as the strings are located on the other side of that field. What it does do is create the nagging squealing under higher gain. That is the plate actually moving at that frequency. Dipping it in wax helps but removing it solves the problems of microphonics if you use the latex/lockwasher technique. The neck pickup cover can also be a location for mechanical feedback, all of my pickups are wax dipped, the ones with the metal cover are dipped assembled to create a solid piece that can't vibrate. I also use latex hose to mount it, no springs are those are also magnetic and will vibrate/squeal at higher gains. Early Hendrix recordings and live shows had him play 1965 era Strats that also used latex hose to mount the pickups. Later CBS Strats switched to steel springs, you can hear Hendrix struggle to control the squealing of those guitars.

The secret of the Telecaster bridge pickup spank is the geometry of the coil. It is a larger bobbin than a Strat pickup and that focuses a narrower magnetic field under the strings than you get with a Strat or Jazzmaster pickup. That is due to the windings, it's a rather narrow stack with cotton string used to fill out the bobbin after winding. If you look at a Jazzmaster pickup, it's a flatter bobbin with the windings spread out further away from the magnet poles. That grabs a wider aperature of the string's field making for a fatter tone.

The magic of the Telecaster is found in the player's hands. With that ability to create a wide pallet of string tones from the player, it's as individual a sound as the player wishes to develope. Compared to Gibson humbuckers that double the fundamental frequency, those tend to make the player sound more anonomous and alike unless the player developes a unique way of attacking the strings.