How to Swap pickups on a Telecast er
Supercharge your Telecaster’s sound with some spangly new pickups
Changing a pickup can really rejuvenate your old guitar and with the Tele design there are hundreds of choices for upgrades – you can certainly beat those stock pickups. The Telecaster isn’t the easiest guitar to swap pickups on, we will admit, as you’ve got to de-string and take the bridge off to do it. TG will take you through the DIY method to get you twanging your heart away...
To avoid confusion we’re going to call the neck pickup the ‘rhythm pickup’ and the bridge pickup the ‘lead pickup’. This guide will also cover two different types of lead pickup.
The patient of choice is a Fender ‘Tele-bration’ Bamboo Tele (a bit of a rarity!) and we’re upgrading to some swish ’64 Telecaster pickups. The ’64 pickups feature a copper backplate on the rear of the lead pickup, which saves a step. For the sake of this demo we’ve shown you how to solder a plastic baseplate lead pickup too.
Get your screwdrivers out and soldering iron on!