Squier Affinity Series Telecaster Electric Guitar Rosewood - Race Red, New! For a brief period in the late 1950s, Fender ceased through-body stringing on Telecasters and installed bridges with six holes drilled through the back lip. The presence of six individual saddles on the Stratocaster hints that Leo Fender understood that the three-saddle design has its limitations in terms of intonation. It’s surely the ultimate birthday gift for any obsessive Tele twanger. Tune all the strings to concert pitch, then try holding down the low E string at the first fret with your left hand and hold the same string down with the thumb of your right hand somewhere around the 16th fret. It’s surprising just how many little parts are used to put a guitar together. Try a few and see which you prefer. Featuring: an Epiphone classic, a Charvel rock machine, a Rivolta baritone and more. Wilkinson tuners and bridge. Vote now! Each hole came through almost dead centre, and we pushed the ferrules into position. The kit comes with a 3/16-inch neck shim that creates a back angle. I only accepted the Squier because I had a chance to … [QUESTION] What mods/upgrades should I do to a Squier Affinity Telecaster? If the gap seems excessive, say 2mm or more, then try turning the trussrod clockwise by about a quarter turn until the gap reduces. Although this had a less profound effect than changing the pickup, we did notice a smoother and more full-bodied tone with some extra sustain. Chinese takeaway cartons are ideal for the hardware, and we placed all the screws, springs and nuts into a smaller receptacle. With hot humbuckers, you’ll get more of an upper-midrange boost. That’s not a problem, because a bewildering array of replacement pickup options allow you to combine the Tele’s utilitarian looks and functionality with any tone you want. As far as one-piece maple necks are concerned, we would associate them with clear definition, enhanced sustain and tonal brightness. The ‘Super Switch’ is unlike a regular five-way Strat switch. The Bigsby itself has a front roller bar and it’s screwed onto the top of the guitar. For some players, Leo Fender’s plank was perfect from the get-go. Putting hum-cancelling properties aside for a moment, humbucking pickups are essentially two single-coil pickups wired in series. The Fender "solid body electric spanish guitar" first known as the Esquire in 1948, the Broadcaster in 1950, and finally, the legendary Telecaster in 1951. Here the outer string holes are drilled, and four out of the five original screw holes are filled. There are plenty to choose from on eBay, and for a swampy blues vibe you could go for faux alligator. You could also check out slot-less control plates that are drilled for toggle switches instead. You may want to mess with your tone control, too. The Janelle Monáe, Prince and Earth, Wind & Fire collaborator owes his guitar love to a monochromatic Space Ace…. Allparts (guard, switch, ferrules) So he requested through-body stringing to aim for more sustain, a beefier bridge pickup, and finally a pearl pickguard to perk up the looks. If you try this, remember to swap over the volume and tone potentiometers and flip the switch around, otherwise everything will work backwards! The masking tape is used as an alignment guide. Some players find the standard Telecaster switch less than ideal for speedy pickup changes. Most of the wiring mods we have discussed elsewhere in this feature are included in a switchable format on the Toneshaper. Squier Affinity Telecaster, Maple, Butterscotch Blonde A superb gateway into the time-honored Fender family, the Squier Affinity Series Telecaster delivers legendary design and quintessential tone for today's aspiring guitar hero. The latest guitar news, reviews and features delivered to your inbox. We have already discussed the series switching mod for getting humbucker-style sounds from a regular two-pickup Tele using push/pull switches or a four-way switch. Love em. We used a 3mm drill bit and set the drill to its slowest setting to try to minimise wander. Installed in a Tele, the ‘Super Switch’ gives you the three regular Tele tones and the series combination, plus neck and bridge in series but out of phase. The November 2020 issue of Guitar Magazine is out now! If leather isn’t your thing, check out El Dorado’s selection of engraved parts. The ‘67 Fender Stratocaster helped birth an entire subculture of guitar modding. Alternatively, you can fit ‘no load’ potentiometers that click into bypass mode. Waylon Jennings blazed the trail that many have followed, and you can get one just like Waylon’s from Mosby Guitars or 4E Custom Guitars, or go for something more individual from El Dorado. We simply coated the ends of some matches with Titebond Original wood glue, gently tapped then into the screw holes and left them overnight. From 2020 with love: the best guitars, amps, pedals and accessories of the year. The Fender Deluxe Nashville Telecaster (seen above) is an off-the-shelf Tele/Strat hybrid with an added Strat middle pickup. We provide insight and opinion about gear, artists, technique and the guitar industry for all genres and skill levels. 2 – Strip Down: The first job was to strip everything down. 4 – Fitting The String Ferrules: This was by far the trickiest part of our project. Ahh, the mighty Telecaster. Alternatively, if you’re doing a lot of behind the nut string-bending tricks, you may want to consider modernising with some diecast staggered-post tuners. After all, Telecasters are naturally bright guitars and the original ash bodies and chunky maple necks didn’t do anything to tame the treble. Top-loading is also said to provide a more slinky feel – much like dropping down half a string gauge. I was thinking of purchasing a Squier Affinity Series Telecaster after trying one at a music store and liking the overall feel. From 2020 with love: the best guitars, amps, pedals and accessories of the year. The most dangerous time of year for your wallets is here. 7 – Fitting The Push/Push Strips: Seymour Duncan deserve a lot of credit for providing so much technical information on their products. Higher-resistance pots accentuate that resonance peak, which happens to be in the treble region with Telecasters. While retaining the stock bridge, you could try a Seymour Duncan Little ’59 for a PAF-like humbucker tone. If you don’t like the results, this mod is easily reversed. Tele types often feel compelled to imitate truck horns and train whistles. The low end also seemed to gain power, so it was really about more body and less twang. For many years, players have complained that the sides of Fender’s ‘ashtray’ bridge hinders access to the strings and takes the skin off their knuckles. Some perfectly good Telecasters of Far Eastern origin are let down by low-quality electronic components. May I intruduce my Affinity Squier to you? This limited-run axe is a Fender-designed honey. Regular Teles have two single-coil pickups, so why not add a series switch? With a starring role on more hit records than you could possibly count, the ultimate workingman’s six-string electric is a 66-year-old design that still feels, in so many ways, utterly contemporary. The January 2021 issue of Guitar Magazine is out now! After negotiating a deal - he gave me cash and his Squier Affinity Telecaster. This one has two wafers, each loaded with 12 solder tags that are grouped in two batches of six. The new bridge was fixed on with the centre screw at the back and aligned by eye, using the original screw holes and the masking tape as a visual guide. You should see a very small gap between the string and the seventh fret. In the first of a series looking at the chord shapes and sequences used by the Beatles, we get inside the head of John Lennon and find a solid rhythm guitarist with an ear for original chord changes. The solution could be a set of ‘heavy knurl’ knobs. A 5/16″ drill bit was required to make the ferrule holes, so we marked out a 5/16″ square around each centre point and shaded the surrounding areas to make the drilling target easy to spot (see picture top left). Get organised with one receptacle for the main hardware components and another for all the screws, springs and nuts. She performed a heartfelt rendition of Alice in Chains' Black Gives Way To Blue. And if you're planning to modify a cheaper telecaster, at the very least get a squier classic vibe one, the Affinity guitars don't have the classic layout and dimensions, so hardly any, if any available tele parts are going to fit. Guitar.com Live — THE WORLD'S LEADING VIRTUAL GUITAR SHOW —, Ry Cooder’s original Coodercaster is now on sale for $150,000. The pickguard was taken off then we stripped out all the electrics after making a wiring diagram. Billy Corgan’s first great tearing of the script led to a bold and ambitious album that put the guitars up front and loud. Affinity … Flip your control plate. Research had also indicated that while Little ’59 pickups are too large for Mexican Tele bridges, they will fit into Squier bridges without much difficulty. Understandably, players sometimes want and need the best of both worlds. You can also switch a treble bleed resistor/capacitor network in or out. Our replacement guard needed a little bit of filing and sanding to get it to fit around the end of the neck, but all of the screws more or less lined up. In our final part of our look at the stylings of the legendary Three Kings, we tackle the searing style of Freddie King. ... 2020 Affinity Strat Tom Delonge Style Mod Silver. It can’t be denied that some players like the idea of a Telecaster more than the actuality. 6 – Fitting The Bridge:  We had left the masking tape on the top of the guitar to indicate the location of the original bridge. Here we present 25 tips that will help turn your guitar into a tone machine. Featuring: an Epiphone classic, a Charvel rock machine, a Rivolta baritone and more. While six-saddle Teles are common these days, many prefer the tone of the old brass- and steel-barrel saddles, so if you want to keep things intonated properly, get yourself some compensated units. Do Fender’s American Professional II instruments set a new standard? Lyndon also asked for a coil tap so he’d have the option to switch to single coil tones whenever he needed to. We hoped it would be a suitable replacement – and it also had the extra screw holes at the front of the bridgeplate, just like the one we were replacing. Lyndon Jones has a nice Squier partscaster for stage use but it could do with one or two little tweaks to make it perfect. By the mid-50s, players had already begun swapping them out, and some of the most iconic and historically important Telecasters of all time, such as Keith Richards’ Micawber and Albert Collins’ Custom, had humbuckers in the neck. In the context of Lyndon’s guitar it was exactly the result we wanted – but hardcore Telecaster pickers may feel differently. These Affinity telecasters had the following specifications: 1. www.mansons.co.uk Lyndon’s main priority was replacing the stock top-loader bridge with one that allowed for through-body stringing. Traditionally, you have to remove the pickguard to adjust a Tele neck pickup as it’s mounted to the body. Wiring complete. Conventional guitar circuits have inherent treble roll-off; and pickup inductance, pot resistance and cable capacitance combine to create a resonance peak at the cut-off frequency. However, you could also consider the five-way ‘Super Switch’ for even more tone options. If you do lose a screw or spring, nine times out of 10 it will be stuck to one of the pickups – so it’s a good idea to separate the pickups for storage. Fender chose 250k pots because they roll off some of the top end. By checking the boxes you agree to receive the following from us via e-mail. The common perception is that rosewood fingerboards warmed up the Tele tone compared to the earlier one-piece maple necks. The Parsons White string bender is a mechanical device that’s installed in a chamber routed into the back of the body. 9 – Setting Up And Final Adjustments: Countless books have been written about setting up guitars, but here’s a very rough guide to get you up and running. If funds won’t stretch that far, what about a tooled leather pickguard or control cover instead? In the first of a series looking at the chord shapes and sequences used by the Beatles, we get inside the head of John Lennon and find a solid rhythm guitarist with an ear for original chord changes. Fix pieces of masking tape at each end of the pickup hole, flip the pickup over and drop it through the hole in the pickguard. Even so, you could consider the TV Jones T-Style for some DeArmond flavour, the McNelly T-Bar for P-90 tones or the Vintage Vibe VT-N-BL for Charlie Christian jazziness. A bridge with three bronze saddles. You can mount a mini toggle switch on the control plate between the two knobs or use a push/pull switch. However, we were able to re-use the centre screw hole at the back of our bridge, so that provided a useful location point. Wilkinson single pickups with a Hot Twin Blade humbucker Alinco 5 magnet. Traditional Tele jack sockets are held in place by a retainer clip that is notoriously fiddly to tighten up properly. Carefully cut out the radius gauge and use the one that’s closest to the radius of your guitar’s board to set the height of the B, G, D and A strings. The following morning we snapped off the excess and shaved the top smooth with a Stanley knife blade. The diameter of the shafts of the original pots turned out to be slightly narrower than the shaft of the push/push switch pot, so we widened the tone control hole with a step cutter and hooked everything up according to the diagram. The answer is just to swap over the black and white wires of the neck pickup. You can go to Affinity Telecaster Mod … I'd really like to have a starting point for modding guitars, without spending too much. Originally introduced in 1953, this massive casting replaces the original bridge and raises the bridge pickup height. The white lead from the neck pickup is connected to ground and the black wire is connected to the switch – this was done to reverse the polarity of the pickup. Squier Affinity Strat Guitar Used – $119. It features the most famous of all Tele finishes atop an alder body … Two holes have to be drilled behind the bridge pickup, with two more above the strap button, but there’s no need to drill for bridge posts. Four surface-mount tone capacitors are attached to the PCB; the switching allows you to use them individually or in combination, enabling you to choose between 15 different values. That’s perfectly understandable, but few stop to consider how neck thickness and mass affect this most ‘acoustic’ of all electric guitars. 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