Kley De Jong | 1 decade ago

This is my Tele that I assembled from parts.

-The neck is from allparts (trf-22 is the spec. It is super high quality, can't beat it for the $).

-The body was solid alder with a nice blonde finish

-The pickups include a tex mex strat p/up in the neck and an American tele p/up in the bridge. Yes I had to enlarge the pickguard to fit the tex mex. The body is routed for a humbucker so there's plenty of room. I'm thinking about trying a P90 sometime.

-I wired up a 4 way switch to have both pickups in series and parallel

The wood is really high quality and matched with two pickups that I really like = great tone. It sounds fantastic. The tone is definitely in MIA Fender territory. The finish and overall aesthetic is not custom shop quality, but hey its a blue collar tele. I'm really glad I did it!

Well worth it so far!

The amp is a Fender Blues Junior. Most of the time the settings are:

Volume - 8
Fat - On
Treble - 7
Bass - 12
Mid - 9
master - 2
reverb - 1

I have a little section where I clean up the preamp and even out the EQ a little for some more twang.

I use my pedalboard too for some variety. I have a Korg blackout, BYOC overdrive, custom built OD/boost that gives some more ballsy dirt, Rocktron vertigo vibe, SD pickup booster.

I went with a Tele because it still has that great single coil neck sound, but with some added bite in the bridge. I've always had a hard time finding a tone I really like on my strat bridge pup. This tele bridge really bites. If I set my amp plenty warm it doesn't get ice picky, and with some OD it really rocks out. Its a really simple first time build (assembly) and it looks cool too.