Featured, Opinion »

Ok, so this may be just me but since I read about it a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about it and being annoyed about it pretty regularly.
Guitarist, John 5 likes Telcasters, and why wouldn’t he? He has a couple of, really quite nice, signature models with Fender and their lower-budget sibling, Squier. I like the guitars a lot and even quite like John 5 himself.
If you haven’t already seen (and you may well have as this isn’t spanking new news), John 5 is selling his signature guitars …

Featured, Workshop »

Gah! Broken strings. Who needs ’em?
I remember learning to play guitar as a poor teenager and seeking out music stores who sold single strings as I couldn’t afford to replace a whole set.  I remember winding extra turns unto my tuners and, when a string broke, carefully tying its ball-end onto the slack in the string so I could avoid having to buy even another single string.
While all of that may have been character-forming, it wasn’t much fun.  If only I’d known then about a relatively simple method of reducing the …

Featured, News »

Look closely.
See that?  That’s a rosewood bridge with an acoustic saddle on there.  But it looks like a Tele bridge.  If you’re going to make a hybrid-type guitar from a Tele, that’s a nice touch.
And that’s what this is.  The Acoustasonic Tele is fitted with a Fishman Aurasystem to allow realistic, acoustic tones from a Tele.  It’s also got a regular, magnetic neck pickup to give more traditional (electric) Tele sounds.
Cool, eh?

The magnetic pickup is a Custom Shop Twisted Tele single-coil.  Its controls are on the front plate as per …

Featured, News »

Squier have announced the introduction of two new versions of classic Telecaster guitars.
Say hello to the Squier Classic Vibe Telecaster Custom and the Classic Vibe Telecaster Thinline guitars.  Both are based on classic Tele designs from the ’60’s.
The Classic Vibe Thinline has a semi-hollow body, as you’d expect, but it’s made from mahogany .  The tinted lacuqer finish looks great and we’ve always loved the thinline pickguard – looks cool as far as we’re concerned – and this one is a snazzy mint green.
The Thinline has a maple neck with …

Featured, News »

If you pop over to Fender’s UK site, you can register to win a Squier Telecaster that has been signed by a whole crapload of musicians.
All you need to do is enter your details at Fender and this could be yours. The winner will be picked on 4th of January.
All of the autographers (yeah, we know it’s not a word) are members of bands who performed at this year’s Reading Festival.
And there’s a lot of them.  The guitar is signed by:

Alexisonfire
Atreyu
Bring Me The Horizon
Deftones
Enter Shikari
Fightstar
Frank Turner
Funeral For A Friend
Glasvegas
Gossip
Hockey
Kids In …

Headline, How To, Workshop »

The 3-Saddle Intonation Problem
If you play a Telecaster with a 3-saddle bridge (like the one shown opposite), you may be aware that setting intonation on the instrument is a matter of compromise.  Because a single adjustment screw sets the intonation on two different strings at the same time, Telecaster intonation is really a matter of ‘balancing the differences’ and getting each string as close as possible without putting its partner string out by too much.
Move to a 6-saddle bridge
If this really bothers you, you can move to a 6-saddle bridge. …

How To, Workshop »

You’re a millionaire playboy guitarist with a vintage Fender or you’re just someone with one of many current or past Fender originals and reissues.
Whatever the case, you’re finding that those big blues bends that you love doing are buzzing or, worse still, choking-out completely and dying. Your guitar plays fine and buzz-free the rest of the time but as soon as you go for a nice, soulful, bent note, it buzzes or chokes.
Annoying.
Possibly more annoying is when I tell you that there’s a good chance it’s just a limitation …

Workshop »

There are a number of reasons that a plucked guitar string might buzz.  We’ll probably go into some of those reasons in future articles but, as I happened to have one of the more uncommon reasons for a buzzing string in the workshop, I thought I’d share it with you.
What I had was a Tele with a few minor issues and a pronounced, ‘zingy’, buzz on the D-string.  This wasn’t fret-buzz – the string buzzed even when fingered at the last fret with no more neck in the picture (and …