Back in the early '90s, a friend offered me a mid-'70s Telecaster Bass. He loved P-Basses, and was offering me the Tele because he never played it. He had had it refinished black, but his greatest sin was trying to turn it from the later humbucker-equipped version to the earlier single-coil version. Then he decided that he didn't like the sound of the single-coil pickup and had it routed for a regular split-coil pup. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of it in that state. Anyway, he sold it to me for $250!
I used to drool over the mid-'80s Fender Japan reissue version, black with black pickguard and the humbucker, so I asked Jim Mouradian if he could find a humbucker for it. He found a NOS in the box at a guitar show for $100, and I had him put it in with probably a Warmoth replacement pickguard. At various times either one or the other pup was wired exclusively (so the other wasn't usable), or at one time I had them wired together so instead of volume & tone, it was volume/volume for each pup. The Telecaster humbucker is very high-powered, kind of like a mudbucker (though with more mids), so you either had the P at one volume, the 'bucker at least twice as loud, and together they were closer to the P volume but with a really round, fat tone. Oh yeah, he put a Badass II on it as well.
Here's a (bad) pic of it as it ended up:
And a close-up (I wish I had taken a few just regular shots when I had the chance!):
There were two things that I really liked about this bass. One was the neck - kind of like a baseball bat sawn in half! I like thin necks too, but sometimes a fat chunky neck is what you need to get you (or me that is) to stop overplaying! The other thing was that the G-string was just as fat and powerful as the other strings, unlike my MIJ Jazz whose G-string could be kind of thin compared to the others.
But then I stopped playing (back around '95), and it languished in its case. I never really liked the finish or the P pup. When I found a used set of Alembic Activators for $275 (they usually go for close to a grand!), I jumped on them. I've also been jonesing for a "root beer" finish lately (though I found out it's really called "mocha"), so I got in touch with our very own Boston Guitar Repair, and shipped it out to him last week. He just called me today, we talked about what's going to be done with it. I'm going to have it refinned mocha, he's going to cut a black pickguard for me, tweaked slightly from the original design to cover the hole for the single-coil (even if the hole gets plugged, since mocha is a transparent finish):
I want the pickups wired completely independently, so he's looking into routing another hole on the side next to the current one, though I think I'm going to have the humbucker go through the original plug and the Alembic controls and plug all top-mounted. I also put on an old MIJ reissue bridge.
I'll update as details come in - also, BGR will probably blog it as well!
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