Stratocaster vs. Telecaster

Tele, despite being less versatile in terms of tone and more boxy and awkwardly shaped from a comfort standpoint. I also kinda have a thing against single cutaways! Am I just in denial? All I know is I'm probably never going to buy a Strat but I could easily imagine picking up a second Tele or ASAT at some point.

this is kinda like being forced to choose which of your two beloved kittens you will feed into a woodchipper tbh

nonetheless voted telecaster for its iconic, utilitarian design and the sound of that bridge pickup through a hot amp is one of the foundation stones of popular music

i could probably just as easily have voted strat for its sleek design which still looks kinda futuristic even today and those uniquely 'glassy' tones. i'll probably want to change my vote tomorrow.

Have no idea what the difference in sound is, tbh.

they're both pretty boring. voted tele because it's slightly less boring.

they're no bc rich, true

tele because it has more of an identity. Strats are perfectly fine guitars and have been used very well by many, but only a few guitarists really make them stand out as anything other than versatile, workhorse guitars.

honestly the two things that immediately come to mind when I think Strat are Hendrix (which is good) and that awful SRV tone.

hendrix, dave gilmour, mark knopfler and yngwie malmsteen are the ones which spring to mind for me, probably due to the lasting taint of teenage overexposure to guitar magazines and features on players i didn't give a fuck about

david byrne for me for some reason

Buddy Holly
John Frusciante

Strat definitely. I prefer its versatility.

Cadillac vs. Mustang.

I have a Tele reissue with a humbucker at the neck and some of the body molding of a Strat. Apparently Andy Summers made a similar mod to his Tele.

my tele is a relatively recent usa one with a belly contour and it makes me feel like it's okay to be a fat fuck

thanks fender for validating my poor diet choices

david byrne for me for some reason

oh yeah, for sure - stop making sense is a great showcase for strats

Tele, for the twang especially but also for rhythm (and obviously awesome Prince, Page, et al. lead). Unless you want/need that specific Strat quack.

(Another poll could be which neck pickup is less useful. Prolly the Tele's, though Nile Rodgers is the only Strat player I can think of who really hangs out on the neck pickup all the time.)

My go-to tele sound is the middle position. The twang is not really my thing and the neck is too dark. lol, I have all these negative opinions about teles and still prefer them to strats.

oh my god, Strat without question. In addition to being extremely versatile, it allows the player's personality to come through more vividly than any other guitar. the Tele is too limited in comparison- sure, it has twang, but you can get the same tone out of a Strat with the neck/middle pickup switch. Everything that a Tele can do, a Strat can do better: rhythm, lead, texture, etc. Strats also looker cooler and have a better shape. Prince is the only person to ever shred a Tele and make it look as cool as a Strat.

bridge pickup on the Strat: the best rhythm tone ever
neck pickup: the best lead tone ever

When I started thinking about guitars and wanted to buy one, Teles were so simple and caveman like and didn't have that cheap looking plastic trem spring cover on the back and people like Joe Strummer and Prince and Buck Owens played them while Strats were played by Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn and Yngwie Malmsteen and those guys all sucked.

I honestly don't think I've ever actually played a stratocaster other than maybe picking one up once in a while in a guitar store, never through an amp for sure. I don't really hate them (and I do dig the 70s ones with the giant headstocks) but they (and Les Pauls) seem so standard and generic that I'm never really drawn to them like I am to SGs and Jazzmasters and Teles - which are obviously not obscure at all, just not THE standard guitar.

A lot of my bias is aesthetic too because I'm a shitty guitar player but love design and sculpture.

in the end probably a tele

i've never played a strat that felt right just as is. it required some modifying but by the end i wasn't convinced

a tele on the other hand felt right, love the tone, and with minor mods, it sounds beautiful. recording it is a joy and i don't mind the design/shape

having said that, i'm not a tele/strat guy

i love the dark overtones of gibson les pauls or more mid-range/mellow tones of a jazzmaster, but they are annoying to record

tele because it has more of an identity.

^^^ Danny Gatton, Albert Lee, Pete Anderson, Bill Kirchen, some of my most favorite guitar players are in that chicken-pickin' Tele mode.

Prince is the only person to ever shred a Tele and make it look as cool as a Strat.

Not even getting into country guys (from James Burton to Brad Paisley), Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Bruce Springsteen, Jonny Greenwood, Mike Campbell, Robbie Robertson, James Honeyman-Scott, etc. And in terms of looking cool and not shredding, Andy Summers, Wilko Johnson, Joe Strummer, Syd Barrett, Keith Richards, etc. Obviously not all of these dudes are identified exclusively as Tele players, but impressively, many are! Strats are cool, too, but from dudes playing electric blooze to heavily compressed '80s cheese, few seem to make the most of them. But of course, who else do you need beyond Hendrix on the Strat front?

Voted Tele. I don't really like the sound of either guitar but I like what Chris Spencer from Unsane can do with a Tele.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqF1nyjCU8M

Page shredding on a Les Paul >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Page shredding on a Tele

it's just not the same. with the exception of Prince, it always looks like their main guitar got busted or stolen and they're borrowing some opening band's guitar. it just looks WACK

I am not an accomplished guitarist but c'mom, Telecaster cus I AM A GROWN UP. For a pre-teen nephew/niece, yeah I might recommend a Strat. I have the mexican Tele cos I never had much money, but I haven't picked up a Strat since I was like 12? I had no idea this was even a debate...

2:15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzBVvD1vUvM

Strats are incredibly hard to play well, ime, the action is so sensitive.

Teles are much more versatile from a style point of view

oh wait this is on ILM... umm strats i guess.

because jimi

The best rhythm tone ever. Silver mercury bliss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxATZPKbAqU

like someone mentioned above, you'll see a bunch of local blues guitarists play strats, apart from beginner guitarists

a few xposts

Oh yeah of course, the Smashing Fucken Pumpkins must be the decider here. Prince, Springsteen, Strummer.. I am comfortable in my position.

hey man, put Billy and the Pumpkins and everything else out of your mind....*bong rip*..........just listen to that tone

Not wack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf2e4QPPxJY

Oh, Doug Martsch is a Strat guy too. But I think he switched out the pickups and has the selector switch permanently jammed in one position or something.

seriously, when Dylan talked about the "thin wild mercury sound" of Blonde on Blonde..... Billy's clean rhythm tone circa '93-'94.... it's that fat wild mercury sound

Billy also uses Lace Sensors in his Strats fwiw

Have you kept it stock or modded it?
At one point I had the pickup switch and tone knob removed, so all it has is the volume control. I took the tone knob off because I always had it turned all the way up and never touched it—I dialed in the tone on my amp instead. As for the selector switch, I’m pretty sure that the middle position is the only setting I can use now. The in-between settings were completely useless to me.

I do all the sound-shaping stuff with pedals. I’m not a tone junkie. I don’t even know if a Strat is the best guitar for me. I just got it because someone at the guitar store where I bought it recommended it. To get the best sound, I always have to jack it up with a preamp. At first I didn’t understand that stuff, but once I started using a preamp, I got a much bigger and more satisfying sound.

Ok Doug Martsch is an acceptable counterpoint. Is "Billy" meant to refer to the Smashing Pumpkins again? cus eh... no.

Billy was the only one in SP that played Strats, James mostly used Les Pauls.

you don't even have to listen to him sing. just that tone in the Luna video.... fuck me running if that's not the best clean rhythm tone i've ever heard

for tele players i immediately think of robyn hitchcock for silvery shimmer and d boon for skrawk

Billy was the only one in SP that played Strats, James mostly used Les Pauls.
Oh Ok cool, I'll run straight awaya nd check them out.

strat = r thompson for christ's sake!!! and byrne

Yeah, Richard Thompson owns that shit

Also, Alex Chilton on the first 2 Big Star albums, total strat sound

I wish Richard Thompson was my dad. Or at least my cool uncle.

Let's not forget David Gilmour

(it is entirely possible that Richard Thompson is my uncle, ftr).

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51XtWa3SqVL.jpg

thread closed

we were all confused when they chose to name the new amp line 'mustang' cos well... they already had a fender mustang. but thats how it was explained (still dumb to me)

If I wanted a very classically nashville-sounding telecaster, what would be the reach option, the midrange option and the budget option? Or should I be looking for older? MIJ? Some other brand?

- 52 american vintage (used) or the now titled american original (50s or 60s)
- classic series baja 60s tele
- squier classic vibe tele

haha of course the clasically nashville tele is called baja.

I like the look of the body on this one a lot
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/lKoAAOSw1PdgonmY/s-l1600.jpg

perhaps also subliminal because my music room has the exact same crappy grey faux-wood flooring.

If it wasn’t a particularly relic the metal flake Brad Paisley signature would be cool.

Particularly ugly*

2 thoughts about a Nashville sounding Tele - "Nashville" often refers to the practice of installing a Strat middle pickup (below). and of course Nashville tuning replaces the low wound strings with plain strings tuned an octave higher. Never tried it myself but now that I think about it ...
https://www.fmicassets.com/Damroot/LgJpg/10002/0147502301_gtr_frt_001_rr.jpg

yah they do have a 'nashville tele' but who wants to look at three pickups in a tele!?

amen

Def don’t mean that, just want something bright, spanky and twangy

I would like a Syd Barrett Esquire - ‘60s style with rosewood instead of butterscotch or blonde with maple.

And a toploader bridge IIRC

got my Squier Classic Vibe 50s with B and G-benders....guitar itself is gorgeous, neck feels great, overall fit and finish is really impressive for a low/midline guitar

never seen a bender mechanism quite like this....so you basically put the crook of your elbow between the two bars, if you push down on the lower one that bends the B and if you push up on the higher one it bends the G

definitely going to be a lot fucking harder to learn how to play with this than I thought...watched too many videos of Nashville hotshot guys like Brad Paisley using benders they make it look so easy

https://i.postimg.cc/bv2v9v8n/PXL-20210611-123825953-MP.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/q7g1m9Zy/PXL-20210611-123832494-MP.jpg

take it to the other thread! i wanna see your other guitars too :)

whoa - I assume that's not stock/you had it done custom? I'd love to have benders on my eventual extremely nashville tele. The strap hook ones look fun.

haha I will Spottie didn't know what the protocol was for actual Teles

ma - it was already installed, bought it off Reverb, was only $450 and I never see b bender guitars for cheap

the mechanism itself is a mystery, it's probably closest to what Hipshot does for benders but I haven't been able to find another guitar with this particular bridge

it's definitely not stock

yeah I mean that was semi-rhetorical, clearly that is some homebrew stuff there

it could be a one-off someone made, my one worry is if it breaks or gets way out of wack who's going to be able to service it?

but at the end of the day, it's still a nice Tele so I could always go back to a regular bridge

does anyone have opinions on replacement pickups for a Squier? worth it? any particular brands/models?

Yeah I've seen the smaller ones that are on the bridge and I guess you operate with the palm of your hand or something, but I've never seen one like that.

does anyone have opinions on replacement pickups for a Squier? worth it? any particular brands/models?

The bender design I am familiar with is an internal mechanism linked to the strap button, so you just press down on the neck.

That crook-of-the-elbow design is intriguing but I know I would never be able to use it accurately

I don't think I'll be a hot shit nashville guy but my hope is that it could be cool in a non country context, like using looper/delay soundscape shoegaze type stuff? Maybe?

Finally got the long lost 93 American strat back and had it set up. It plays and sounds “good” but I still have a love-hate relationship with that glassy Strat tone. This was one of the better tones I got out of it on my first run. It’s a bit blues bar band for my liking.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQUJbdLDEDA/?utm_medium=copy_link

UMS it looks like a Timara bender or a copy thereof? https://www.timarastringbenders.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=bg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKmW0ptzxs

Man alive, I getcha, but for me the glassiness is the whole point. In that clip (fun!) where you're on the bridge pickup, it sounds almost Telecasterish. Which is certainly a way to approach the instrument but for me it shines most up in the neck position, in a Gilmour stylee.

Yeah, I was definitely going for that. I’ve heard some country guys do the almost-tele thing on a strat but it’s usually disappointing. Otherwise though I feel like the Strat has such a strong tonal personality that it’s very hard not to either sound like you’re doing faux-Gilmour or faux-srv or faux-knopfler or faux-Hendrix.

mattkkkk - thanks so much for finding that! it's definitely the same design. that's actually comforting I was thinking what if something goes bad with it and I need a replacement part

No worries! Looking at the action it seems like the B would be bent by tucking the elbow in to the body, but it might be possible to bend the G by pulling up on the neck (if the G arm is resting in the crook of your elbow)?

Starting to warm to the strat a little tbh, although it's really easy to devolve into very smooth, buttery blues solos with a crying-looking-out-the-window-of-my-private-plane vibe

maybe give Adam Granduciel a buzz?

you might be right about the g bender, it hadn't occurred to me to move the neck I was trying to "pull" it with my arm which is awkward

right now I'm just using the b bender which is already a lot to get my head around

can anyone who’s worked on guitar electronics help me diagnose something?

over the weekend i replaced the volume and tone pots in my 72 thinline with 1 meg pots. i put everything back together today and the results were odd. guitar works, pickup selector works, no weird noises, but....both knobs don’t do anything. i assume the sound i am getting is wide open, no pots active.

my soldering skills are not amazing but i can follow a wiring diagram and the fact that i am getting sound suggests that everything is connected. the way it is wired is that the selector switch and tone pot are soldered to one lug of the volume pot, the output jack is connected to the second lug, and the tone capacitor is connected to the third lug.

help! my powers of logic and reasoning are not telling me what the problem is.

Sounds like you might have wired the pickup switch output to the "top of the pot" and likewise the output jack, somehow. Any chance you bridged between two lugs with a little solder?
A photo would probably show the problem.

This is the wiring on my Greco Deluxe, should be the same as a Thinline setup.
https://i.imgur.com/VKpukh3.jpg

thanks matt, that's a good thought that would at least describe what i am experiencing. i don't *think* i did that but it's totally possible. i am probably going to wait a bit before cracking it open again--it's functional with nice new strings so i'll defer the frustration.

the thinline is only one tone and one volume, mercifully for my shaky soldering hands.

https://i.imgur.com/GmYRWfC.jpg
For each volume pot (bottom two in this pic): pickup wire (braided shield) comes to the pot; braid is grounded on case, hot wire goes to "top" of the pot (one end of the scale, the right hand lug here). "Bottom" of the pot (left hand lug here) is grounded to the case by bending the tag and soldering. For the wire to the selector, the hot goes to the pot wiper (picks somewhere between the top and bottom of the pot range, i.e. volume from full to nothing, and the shield goes to the case for grounding.
For the tone pots (top two here): the "top" of the volume pot (right hand lug) comes to the wiper of the tone pot through a capacitor (i.e. only high freqs come to the tone pot). The "top" of the tone pot is grounded to the case. So by turning the pot, the amount of high-freq going to ground is altered.
The output jack is wired to the switch which is taking its feeds from both volume pots.

oops I see, well the setup for the thinline will be pickups to switch first, then the output of the switch coming in like the braided wires to one volume pot, the output jack coming off the volume pot like the plastic wire above, and the tone pot wired more-or-less the same.
The uninsulated straight wires are just joining all the cases of the pots to ground by the way.

yup, exactly. this is what i followed: https://www.fmicassets.com/Damroot/Original/10002/013-7402B_SISD.pdf

baffled me at first but I think I get it: the pickup goes into the top of the volume pot *and* the top of the tone pot. The bottom of the volume pot is grounded to the case. The tone pot is a varying resistor between the bright signal and a bleed cap which takes treble frequencies away down to the ground at the bottom of the volume pot. So the tone pot is sucking away the treble from the top of the volume pot by some amount, and the output jack is coming from the volume wiper to select the level of this treble-sucked signal.
Excuse the lengthy screed I am just trying to work it out for myself!
In that case if the leg of the volume pot is not grounded to the case (right hand leg on the diagram, could be a dry joint or missed the connection on the diagram like I did at first) then it'd be full output and no tone control all the time, I think.

ahhhh interesting. did not think about it like that. i did note that connection but that one could very well be a bad joint.

or it could also be that the case of the vol pot is not grounded, but that seems unlikely given the number of ways it could be grounded.

yeah, the fact that there is no weird hum suggests to me that everything is grounded. i did a test plugin before screwing it down and putting strings on and there was some serious hum--sure enough one of my grounds to the volume pot had come undone. getting everything secure and *then* having to stuff it back into the available routing space is a pain in the ass.

Can anyone tell me more about the Fender "noiseless" pickups you see on a lot of higher end recent telecasters?

I tried a Mexican Nashville Custom yesterday - it played beautifully, but I felt like somethin was a little off about the pickups. Not sure if I was imagining it, but maybe a bit thin sounding? First I tried it through a Fender Deluxe Reverb. Can't say it sounded bad, it was just REALLY clean, and like I said, maybe a bit thin, lacking some body. Then I tried through one of those 68 Custom Deluxe Reverbs (because I have the 68 Custom Princeton at home). It sounded like ASSSSSSS. Then I tried it through a little Supro, and that was probably the best sound I got, especially with the amp cranked.

For comparison I tried a regular Player telecaster, and although I didn't like the way it played (possibly partly because it has been languishing in a Sam Ash for too long), I though the pickups sounded more like your classic fender tele pickups. But not sure if that's just because I'm used to standard issue fender single coil pickups. So many rave reviews about the noiseless pickups so maybe I have unconscious bias against the newness of them.

(tbc, the Mexican Nashville Custom had noiseless pickups).

My Stratocasters have had the SCN pickups and I like them. But then I like cleans.

Anyone have any experience with either the Fender 75th anniversary tele or the vintera road worn 50s tele? Both of these seem like they might be in my sweet spot of having the more classic “twang” tele sound, no noiseless pickups, and not insanely priced (and the “wear” on the roadworn I’m looking at is pretty minimal, which I prefer if there’s going to be any at all).

I think with most Fenders you will get something that will work, they might need to be setup, but in general they don't have too many total clunkers. Hard saying now, but I think with any name brand guitar you are better off if you got options with stores going and finding a used one in many ways unless there is one you just have to have.

Any tele marked 50s style usually will have a bigger U shaped neck, which to me is a good thing. I don't like yer skinny modern C neck myself, I want a ballbat neck myself.