Building A Partscaster (Telecaster) Part 6 - Pickups

Introduction

The basic guitar is now working in an acoustic way and the control wiring is done, so it's time to move onto the pickups. There are a few design elements that create the "telecaster" sound, but the most important thing is the pickups. They have evolved throughout the years from Leo's original lapsteel pickup, to the modern noiseless pickups that are voiced to sound like they've come from the 1960's.

Ideally I'm aiming for a 1950's sound, but as I started researching, I became bombarded with specs that don't match up to what's readily available today. In fact, the more I looked into it, the more a minefield choosing pickups became. But what's so special about telecaster pickups?

Pickup History

The thing that's quite obvious on a Telecaster, is how unique the pickups are. There's that large pickup built into the bridge, paired with a smaller chrome covered neck pickup, which reminds me of the dissimilar size wheels on a chopper.

Telecaster Pickups.

The original tele was called the Esquire and it only had the bridge pickup. Leo's design used a copper or zinc plated steel base plate with alnico pole pieces and had a relatively low output compared to today's pickups.

The Fender Esquire Pickup

Bolting this directly into the steel bridge focused the magnetic field in a way that made the sound brighter. In fact the resulting sound was too bright and the guitar relied on a series of switched capacitor circuits to tame the harsh trebly tone. Together with its lack of truss rod, (which saw many of the first batch of guitars returned due to bent necks) showed this design to be little more than a stepping stone along the way.

The Bridge Pickup

The bridge pickup isn't too unusual at first glance, but there are two important differences. First it has that steel base plate, and secondly it uses the bridge as an integral part of its magnetic field.

Left bridge pickup, right comparison of magnetic fields.

Compare the bottom field diagram from a telecaster with the one above from a stratocaster. The concentration is clearly stronger, while the pole piece magnets themselves are about the same strength.

The Telecaster neck pickup started out with 43AWG enamelled wire (with a 10kΩ resistance) and soon switched to thicker 42AWG wire (with a 7.8kΩ resistance). They initially had alnico III pole piece magnets, but this was later changed to alnico V and the windings reduced to around 6 to 7kΩ. Standards were pretty loose back then, so windings on the coils could vary by hundreds of turns, and the pole pieces themselves weren't always guaranteed to be Alnico V spec.

The Neck Pickup

The neck pickup was added to the later broadcaster and subsequent guitars, and uses a smaller narrow coil with a metal covering. Typically the neck pickup is as described as "dark" sounding, while the bridge pickup is "bright", and this leads to good mix when the two are used together. The cover itself darkens the sound and it can be removed to open the sound up a bit, to the detriment of increased hum.

It's hard to say much else about this really. It's not uncommon for guitar players to swap out the neck pickup because they're pretty uninspiring, but as I've got no experience with them, my plan was just to get something typically telecaster and see how I felt about them.

What To Buy?

The more research I made, the more variation there seemed to be in Telecaster pickups. In those first few years of the 50's they changed so much, and then there was the changes into the CBS era. I read a lot of reviews, watched a lot of demos and still failed to make a buying decision. It didn't want anything 'hot', expensive, or particularly special in any way. But I had little to go on, other than I wanted alnico magnets rather than ceramic, and low output levels.

I nearly went for Tonerider Hot Classics, the price was reasonable and they sounded okay, but like most of the premium brands, they seemed to only offer slightly hotter versions.

In the end, I spent a very modest £17 on some unbranded alnico V pickups with coil resistances in the right ball park. I'm not a great believer in hype and it's unlikely I'll see any difference to the more expensive pickup sets with similar specifications (which I have no experience of anyway).

Cheap Alnico V pickups from eBay

So, here's what I bought, something not far from the 1955 spec, which should be bright and twangy. My plan is, they'll do for now and can always be swapped out later if I don't like them.