Something rare... Denim & Pearl Tele

[Fretworn]

Looks great. Need to bust out some Springsteen and Neil Young covers.

[Marcel]

Looks great, feels great, plays great .... Sounds awesome !!

The usual D string G string intonation battle on this Tele build so the compromise I opted for was slightly sharp on the G as flat on 12th fret D just sounded too wrong. B & high E were pretty good, low E & A are a fraction worse, but way better than D/G. Action is set to near 1.5mm, which does bring out a very slight buzz on the D and G strings at around the 15th fret so a little more fret work is required.

Something I didn't mention earlier was on the original build the fretboard was quite high above the scratch plate. It was either re-route the neck pocket or shave the foot of the neck. Due to the pocket being as deep as permissible for a Tele body and the neck foot being slightly out of square I chose to shave the almost 2mm change from the neck foot. That was fun. I used my router in the binding cutter jig, held the neck square with another jig, and then let the two jigs do their thing on the neck foot. It worked like a charm as now the scratch plate sits wonderfully snug under the Rosewood extension of the 22 fret fretboard.

Sound... it's all in the fingers of the player... Must be... Spent most of the afternoon playing the same few riffs and swapping between the axes in the two group shots while leaving the amp at one setting so as to get a better comparison. Gain was kept flat out with Master maintaining the noise level and bass reduced due to the Celestion loaded ported cabinet that I was using. I noticed most difference due to the different PU's with some being bright, others meaty, others clear and a few absolutely growling gloriously when pushed hard into the AC18W front end. The growlers being the all the rails PU's. All inspired different versions of those few riffs I was repeating which I put down to the real physical and tangible differences in the various guitars.. All is good as the inspiration did venture strongly towards the genre that each is known for.

The Denim Tele sounds like your typical Tele on the neck PU. Not much loss of sustain (if any) due to the denim. It does feel vastly different under the arm and due the denim back is a lot less prone to moving as the fretting hand moves up and down the quite thick in the hand neck. Pulling the volume control sets the rail bridge PU into single coil mode which has a little more of that Tele twang, actually the bridge PU sound more Strat than Tele.

So this denim Tele build sports the following :-
- Alder body with glued denim front/back and double Pearl binding
- Kmise Maple Tele 22 fret neck with dark Rosewood fretboard & Mother of toiletseat almost Pearl inlays and decorative Rosewood 'Skunk stripe'
- Fender chrome '62 ashtray string through bridge
- Camel bone nut (seems more oily than other bone nuts)
- Grover 18-1 tuners
- Pearl scratch plate
- PBG control plate, 3 way switch, neck plate and jack plate
- 500k Vol and Tone controls (0.047uF cap)
- PBG neck PU (didn't expect that did you ??)
- Yibuy 4 wire rails Tele bridge PU (swichable SC/HB on Vol control)

[wazkelly]

Hi Marcel, good to see it all finished, works well and that you are happy how it sounds too.

[Marcel]

I figured it was time... to give a sound sample....

Okay, I know I'm not the worlds gift to guitar playing prowess, far far far from it.... but hopefully you'll get the idea on how this build and my AC18W amp sounds together. Actually the denim Tele is quite fun to play... lots of character...

Nil pedals, nil EQ other than a bass cut due the speaker cabinet. SM57 microphone. V30 and G12H Celestion speakers. All tone changes from the controls on the Denim Tele, input gain on the amp at max and master volume at reasonably loud, and nil plectrum as I couldn't find one.

https://soundcloud.com/user-26130539...551/denim-tele

Enjoy ... !!

[Sonic Mountain]

Sounds good man. That pearl binding really works with the denim.

[DrNomis_44]

That Tele definitely has some character to it.

[wazkelly]

Nice tone and could hear the more Strat like bridge single coil sound you were referring to. Nice crunch too.

[Swanny]

Looks great, and it sounds awesome! Noodling is good.

[Marcel]

Yeah, I like the crunch the amp has Waz. It's that typical 12AX7 overdriven sound... and the amp takes HB's so well... The natural/blonde Strat beside the denim Tele has SD rails (HR/VR/CR) in it and that can growl so nicely in every switch position...

With the denim Tele switching there is 5 possible combinations. Neck alone, Neck with SC bridge or neck with HB bridge, and then SC bridge alone or HB bridge alone. The most mellow tones were obviously the neck PU, And the brightest are the bridge alone with the louder being the HB mode. The neck+bridge combinations are not as loud as the bridge alone yet do offer that different combined tone. SC bridge and neck are both equal perceived volume when individually heard live. I tried a few times in the recording to repeat various riffs with different PU combinations.

There must be some top end roll off somewhere in my record setup as playing back on the PC is not as bright as when live. Maybe my SM57 has an issue, or more likely it's something to do with the Behringer USB interface, and can't really see it as a Reaper DAW problem...

[wazkelly]

Most things sound better live.