Tele Meister
As One Of Fender Custom Shop’s Master Builders, Paul Waller Is A Heavyweight Authority On Fender Mods – Especially For The Special-design Telecasters He’s Best Known For
What Tele mods make a good starting place? “I’d say the weakest link in the Tele electronics is probably the neck pickup. It’s always been predominantly weak compared with the bridge, so that leaves it kinda open to whatever you want. Anything else – anything from humbuckers to P-90s, Charlie Christian pickups – you name it, you can put it in there and it’s acceptable. Whereas if you try to do that to a Strat, people get upset. So that has become a free zone for modification. Definitely the neck pickup would be first order of business for many modders.”
What are good options to tweak neckpickup tone if you want to keep to the traditional Tele pickup format and look? “You could start with the Twisted Tele Custom Shop pickup that we released almost two decades ago now. The cover on the neck pickup is usually grounded into the coil as you wire it up. But by separating the cover – and grounding that separately – as we did on that pickup, that opens you up to doing four-way switching if you want series/parallel pickup selections, things like that, to get extra tones out. This has been pretty popular on some of our Artist Series guitars. The Merle Haggard model had it and a couple of others.” What sort of Tele pickup design tweaks are you most interested in now? “What we see is trends, not unlike the fashion industry or cars or things like that. We [the guitar industry] have almost saturated the market with hot pickups and with pedals, and now we’re seeing people have all this gear that they’re having to push [the signal] through tons of signal path before it gets to the amp. But when you’re searching for tone, it’s often the case that you want to eliminate as much of that stuff as possible.
“My theory is the trend is heading back towards simplicity: a guitar and maybe a drive pedal, then straight into your amp. So I’m voicing coils to be just that – something that doesn’t need to get through a bunch of signal path and where you can actually hear what the guitar is doing again.” Your European Master Design Tele was one of our favourite guitars of last year – and it had a cool onboard boost on it. Why did you add that detail? “Because pedals are so popular and I did want to cater to that a little bit, I wanted to put a mild boost in it for the player who wants a guitar that can have an edge in the mix. So if you bring this ‘secret weapon’ Tele with a boost to the gig… normally you have to stop at 10, but you just went to 11. And that’s without even going to a pedal. The idea was to make the control for the boost user-friendly by controlling it via the volume knob. So it was dial-able. That was important because a lot of times when you have a drive pedal, you can turn it on and off with your foot, but then you’re stuck with the settings – unless you want to bend down while you’re playing and change them. You don’t really want to be reaching down in the middle of whatever you’re trying to accomplish on guitar. But it’s easy to change a setting on the guitar while you’re holding it – just lower your pinky down and roll the knob off a bit. Or you can bring it in as you’re coming up to a solo or whatever. I just thought that was a lot more user-friendly than a stompbox on the floor.
“The other thing is, I voiced those coils to work with that circuit so it would sound like a vintage-style guitar, with single coils, but then as the boost came on, it just felt like the gain channel on an amp or something.”