SOLD!!!! Nashville Deluxe Telecaster SOLD!!!
"Blackie" is a Nashville Deluxe Telecaster that I use as my "blues" Tele. As such, I set this Tele up for a raunchy, "hotter" sound than I do my other Telecasters. This one has an alder body and rosewood neck, both of which keep the trebles down as compared to the ash/maple Teles. You're looking at these photos thinking "That's not a Nashville- they have 3 pickups...". Yes and No. It IS a Nashville Tele, but one of the neat things about Nashville Teles is that they have a "swimming pool" route that's perfect for swapping pickup configurations in and out. In the first photos, Blackie has a standard 2-pup Tele arrangement, but in other configurations it's had a humbucker/Tele, Strat/Tele, Tele/Tele (this one), Tele/Strat/Tele (the Nashville setup), and Strat/Strat/Tele. I bought this Tele specifically for the purpose of pickup experimentation and it's been very useful for that. Plus, these are just flat-out nice Telecaster, IMHO.
Nashville Teles have fairly slim necks as compared to '52 RI's and definitely as compared to any kind of authentic "Relic" or Nocaster. They also have medium-jumbo frets, as compared to vintage sized ones. Tuners are vintage style (which I like), and the headstock sticker nods to tradition, too. I wanted a rosewood neck specifically to give the Tele a different flavor from my maple necks.
Pickup configurations
Following are some of the pickup configurations I've run on this guitar.
First, here's the "swimming pool" route. Makes it really easy to try humbuckers, 2 single coils, whatever you want!
This is a "standard" Tele setup, using a Fender Texas Tele bridge pup and a Bill Lawrence 280 in the neck. It's a good combo, with the TX Tele giving a nice fat, snarly blues sound and the Bill Lawrence giving a cleaner, almost Strat-like sound. The Bill Lawrence is a very "transparent" pickup (I also have a BL bridge pup) in that, if you play clean, it's clean. If you snap the strings, it snaps. It's very good at high volumes where it really maintains clarity- the TX Tele bridge can get a little too dirty at higher amp settings sometimes. The middle position, of course, blends these two sounds into a very nice combination of clean with dirt underneath.
Here I'm using a Stewart MacDonald "Golden Age" humbucker. At first I couldn't get the Tele/Hum combination to work- there were ground problems when using the Texas Tele bridge pup. Checking my (growing!) collection of Tele pups, I found that the Bill Lawrence 280 was wound opposite of the Texas Special, so I tried it with the humbucker. WOW!!! Am I glad I did!! It sounds fantastic now, and the Tele/Hum positions are the BEST. I used a 5-way switch and wired a stupid-simple combination of 1) full hum, 2) hum/Tele, 3) Tele, 4) split hum/Tele, 5) split hum. It's simple because all you have to do is run the sweep lug to the volume. Then find out which lug makes contact when the switch is in the middle- run this one to the Tele hot. Find the lug that contacts when the switch is all the way forward and run this one to the red (hot) humbucker wire. Same thing with the rear-most position and run this to the white (coil split) wire. We're done! It all happens on 1 side of the switch. After trying some pots and caps, I ended up with a 500k volume and .022 mf tone cap.
Now that's "chicken pickin'"!!!