27 May 2006
Telecaster Guitar Sound
A little look at the telecaster guitar sound.
The famous boyfarrell.com tele!
The telecaster has a great sound which is often over shadowed by the it’s younger brother the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson’s Les Paul. The telecaster has a characteristic ‘honk’ that the other two don’t. Sound is a very hard thing to describe in words so please forgive me for saying ‘honk’ a lot in the following. Hope you find the audio clips useful.
The Setup
My telecaster is a fairly standard jobby but points to note:
(1) It has some very nice under-wound single coil-pickups from Mr. O.C.Duff
(2) The body is very old and old (aged) woods tends to sound ‘better’.
Fender Vibro-Champ Amp and the Time Machine Boost pedal.
The guitar amp is a 1960′s Fender Vibro Champ with the front end being crunched by a Legendary Tones’ Time Machine Boost. Admittedly the boost pedal adds a character of it’s own but here we’re testing a telecaster in a real life setup here and pedals are commonstay for guitar players. If anything I find that the boost pedal actually accentuated the tele sound. I quickly mic-ed the amp with an SM57 – no farting about with placement here!
The Sounds
The result was a very raw sounding guitar, there are no effects, the mp3 files following are a straight conversion from the Logic aiff file. I played a similar riff using the 3 different pickup combinations; Neck, Neck + Bridge and Bridge. The volume and tone on the guitar were all set to full. You can see the setting on the amp in the picture.
Telecaster Neck Pickup (337kB)
We are driving the amp really hard here so we have an really crunchy metallic sound.
Telecaster Neck + Bridge Pickups (378kB)
Similar to the neck but with more high frequency sound and less bass. More a clunk than a honk.
Telecaster Bridge Pickup (474kB)
Sounding very raw now. The honk is back big time!
The Conclusion
Apart from my finding it very hard to play the same thing twice(!) we’ve had a very quick and raw look at the telecaster guitar sound. To my hears there is a funky honk when hitting the stings hard in the above clips and also a chiming or metallic raw when strumming. This is very different sound to a raw associated with a Les Paul or the funky sound associated with a Strat. These are the elements that are very ‘telecastery’. Moving through the pickup combinations I noticed that the neck by it’s self and the bridge by it’s self had what I would call the telecaster honk, while it was reduced in the middle position. This could be due to the bridge and middle pickup having the magnet in opposite direction to one another – they are phase cancelling.
Next up is a look at the Les Paul, stay tuned….