New PU for my Tele

[rnolan]

So spent quite a few hours fixing up my Profile Tele.  Unfortunately, while adjusting the neck relief recently I nudged one coils of my SD hot rails (neck position) with the allen key... bummer lost a coil. I've been getting this guitar going (was my main guitar for many years before the Anderson) in dropped D (so we can play pearl jam even flow and soundgarden stuff etc).  The thing is I've done a fully folating Shaller Floyed Rose job on it (so putting it into dropped D isn't trivial). And now the hot rails is half dead, great NOT...  So I bought a new bridge strat hotrails and put it in (neck poss), but cable needed extending...  Also got some saddle shims (to help better match the tele fingerboard curve) and a new (37mm) brass block for the Sh/floyed as it was poking out the back of the guitar before. Anyway all good in the end.

[rnolan]

And

[kawai2g4b]

Well done sir!  That thing has to sound killer.  A local shop had a Jerry Donahue tele in stock (with dual blades in each position) and that opened my eyes to that pickup in a tele.  I wonder why you don't see much of this?

[rnolan]

Hey kawai2g4b,
I spose people like teles' to sound like teles' ?  I like it to play (tele's fight you a bit mmmm) but I'm not interested in the twangy plucky sound, I want to play rock  >:D ,  The one I put in the neck poss is a new strat bridge version (a good quarter(ish) bigger coils (hight) than the previous (now busted  :'( much older) one), luckily the screws worked out to mount it into the body as it came with bolts to mount it from a pick guard and the new strat hot rails have the nuts molded into the pickup casing (but the screws were just the right size, small enough to go through and not bight on the nuts  :whoohoo!: happy about that !).  Sounds very nice..., very smooth when your bending as no pole pieces, very responsive and SD say this is the highest output pickup they make, I've got it wired to a series/parallel switch, get some interesting (nice) tones combined with the bridge PU (an old hotted up SD tele PU). I need to run up some new patches for it though as my Anderson has Ultrasonics (best PU ever IMHO) which are very flat freq resp and my sounds are tweaked for them, so a bit of tweaking required to get the best from the more middy SDs'.
The dual blades work very well, I also wonder why you don't see them often, then again, I've never seen a fully sunken floyed on a tele before.  Initially I put a Gotoh locking trem on it, so routed the back etc (it started life as a fixed bridge tele) but returning flat to the body, not floating (great trem BTW, loved it).  After I got the Anderson with fully floating floyed (and one of the Gotoh fine tuner screws broke) I copied the Anderson routing and installed the shaller floyed.  I also re-fretted it with bigger frets, seems it's time for it to get played a bit more...

[kawai2g4b]

Definitely get your Tele out more!  My Tele strays far from convention as yours does...tension free neck, individual saddles, Carvin neck pickup (those 11 pole piece  pickups almost act like rails).  Best part about mine is the combined pickup position...the out of phase sound has an octave up heavy sound that dominates the fundamental notes when soloing high up the neck.  I have heard and played more than enough out-of-phase sounds to make sound comparisons, I have never heard a guitar that behaves like this   It seriously behaves like my octave fuzzes though in a clean manner, bloom decay and everything.

What many rockers miss out on the Tele is when they focus on the twang factor.  The natural focus and presence of the instrument, pickups notwithstanding, are in line with what so many rockers want out of their instruments...cuts though the mix with an amount of brashness.

[rnolan]

They are a thing unto themselves (to play) (are in line with what so many rockers want out of their instruments)

[RobbHell]

The Hot Rails are great pickups..even for Strats you can get Hum tones and the coil tap very cool. I Love the single.coils Emgs in my Tele.

[rnolan]

The Hot Rails are great pickups..even for Strats you can get Hum tones and the coil tap very cool. I Love the single.coils Emgs in my Tele.

I thought about an EMG(s) for it although I've never been a big fan of active PUs. How do they compare ?