![telecaster neck single coil vs humbucker telecaster neck single coil vs humbucker](https://www.guitarfetish.com/assets/images/tbmain.jpg)
Consequently, an increasingly common player modification of that era was to retrofit Telecasters with humbucking pickups, but only in the neck position. Its mellow single-coil neck pickup contributed less to its signature tone, and many guitarists put less emphasis on it or didn’t use it at all. The great many who still loved the Telecaster in the late 1960s and early 1970s typically did so because of the famously bright, snappy sound of the guitar’s single-coil bridge pickup. The Telecaster Thinline, however, was only mildly successful during its early years.
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They were first offered in 1971 on a redesigned version of the semi-hollow Telecaster Thinline model, with two of them replacing the Thinline’s two single-coil pickups. Lover had perfected his new Fender pickup, called the Wide Range humbucking pickup, by late 1970. I hesitated in making it sound exactly like the Gibson-I figured Fender was known for a brilliant-type sound, so I kept a little more brilliance in the Fender pickup than there was in the Gibson." Also I used cunife magnets, not Gibson’s alnico. The patent had not quite run out, so I designed them a pickup that looked a little different. *"The Fender sales force wanted a copy of a Gibson humbucking pickup wanted it to sound exactly like that. Lover had invented the humbucking pickup while working for Gibson in the mid-1950s, and he now set about designing a new humbucking pickup for Fender, noting that, as quoted in Six Decades of the Fender Telecaster: To establish its own foothold in this guitar sound, Fender hired Seth Lover in 1967. It had not gone unnoticed at Fender headquarters that the bright single-coil sound of the 1950s and 1960s-a sound that Fender practically owned-was giving way in popularity by the late ’60s to the warmer, thicker sound of the humbucking pickups characteristic of instruments by other guitar makers. In his invaluable reference work, Six Decades of the Fender Telecaster, author Tony Bacon notes that, ”As far as the Telecaster was concerned, the 1970s might well be described as the decade of the humbucker.
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Mick Green (Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney).The new Telecaster Custom that was available until 1981 boasted a Seth Lover-designed humbucker in the neck position to pair with the traditional and beloved Telecaster single-coil bridge pickup. From 1959-72, the Fender Custom Telecaster lived as a standard Tele with a bound body. This was the second iteration of what was known as the Telecaster Custom. The classic single-coil stylings of a traditional Fender Telecaster certainly boasts legions of fans around the world, but a growing number of guitarists in the mid-1960s were trending towards the thicker sound of humbucker-equipped instruments and over-driven amplifiers.Īs Fender noticed more and more players outfitting their guitars with humbucking pickups, they enlisted the renowned pickup innovator Seth Lover to work on a proprietary version of a humbucker.Īfter several years of development, Lover had perfected a humbucker that was all Fender, and the Telecaster Custom was born.Įven though the venerable Telecaster has remained largely true to the form it took when officially introduced in the early 1950s, it underwent what many consider its most dramatic change in 1972 when Fender released a production model with a humbucking pickup in the neck position.