Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

Rich_S

Rich_S

HomeGrownToneBrewologist
dangerous_1.jpg


Here's my new 2005 MIM Tele, converted to a Quarter-Pound Esquire. Updated specs:

  • Wilkinson 3-Saddle Compensated Bridge
  • Duncan tapped Quarter-Pound pickup
  • GFS blank control plate
  • 250K variable-tap pot
  • 500K volume pot (Shadow "Kill Pot", thanks for the tip, Mattt!)
  • GFS 3-Ply white pickguard

I call it "Dangerous Type" after the first song I played on it, since I've been on a huge Cars kick lately. I keep asking myself "What would Elliot Easton do?" and this guitar is the slightly warped result. Actually, Les Paul Juniors were also a big inspiration for this guitar; I love their one-pickup, two-knob simplicity.

You may recall my recent rant about this particular guitar:
https://forum.seymourduncan.com/showthread.php?t=197630

In addition, I found the high-E's tuner was rattling around loose, so I needed to tighten the bushing. Also, the A string tuner is missing the nylon washer between the body and the button, and it was rattling around loose, too.

The biggest problem was the low E string falling off the edge of the fingerboard. Dan Erlewine has a great chapter on fixing this in his book, How to Make Your Electric Guitar Play Great, and I pretty much had to give this guitar the full treatment. The neck pocket had gloppy paint runs on both sides and the bottom, so I had to remove the excess paint with a coarse, flat file and a sharp chisel. Cleaning and flattening the pocket gave me the dual benefits of improving neck-to-body coupling and allowing me enough wiggle room to get the neck aligned under the strings. It took a surprisingly hard shove to hold it straight while I tightened the neck screws.

Before:
blue_tele_fb.jpg


After:
dangerous_fb1.jpg



I haven't even had a chance to try it through my rig yet, but played it at 2:00 am through my Vox Amp Plug - the "Classic" (Marshall) version. The tapped QP is one of my all-time favorite pickups, I pretty much designed this guitar solely as a platform for it. Dialed all the way back to the 8.5 Kohm-ish tap, it's twangy enough for my tastes. At 3/4, it's "Riff Raff", and full up it morphs into "Sin City".

I'll post some more comments on how it plays and sounds after I have a chance to set it up, intonate it, and crank it through my rig, but it promises to be fun. More photos, before and after, here: http://s785.photobucket.com/albums/yy134/Rich_S_GuitarGeek/Dangerous%20Type/
 
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Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

Looks great, one of these days I'm going to do something very similar... An Esquire type but Trans Daphne blue ala Curlys recent build. Great job Rich!
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

I hope to play it while sitting in with a St. Louis geezer band some day. (P.S. Your cap is packed & ready to go out in tomorrow's mail.)
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

beautiful!!!

Its funny.. All my life I have HATED Teles.. Thought they were ugly, cheap looking, I hated the twang... HOWEVER........ There is no denying their worth in the arsenal, so I bought one so that I would have tele tones avail. I bought one and the more I play it, the more I love it! So versatile and so many good tones. So, of course, my appreciation of other great teles has gone up too!!
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

So, no tone control, just a variable tap and volume? Your description sounds like what I have been aiming for with my Esquire - any chance you would share the wiring details?
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

sweet! I agree on the tapped QP. You can get twangy Tele tones, and hot humbucker-like tones as well, it's awesome. Just an all around awesome tele.
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

B-E-A-U-tiful! I love that color and the fact that it's an Esquire style guitar makes it look that much cooler :fing2:
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

Completely righteous and as funny as can be I learned that cool little solo for Dangerous Type this AM.

Love the guitar, good luck with it.
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

Dan-ola said:
So, no tone control, just a variable tap and volume? Your description sounds like what I have been aiming for with my Esquire - any chance you would share the wiring details?
Click to expand...

It'll take me day or two to come up with a diagram, but the short version is this: the tap switch is wired like a normal volume control (technical term is a "voltage divider"). The white full-coil wire goes to the top of the pot, and the red tap wire goes to the bottom (whereas a normal volume pot would be grounded). The wiper of the "tap" pot is then the hot feed to the volume control. So, when the tap pot is "up" it gives full coil, "down" gives the tapped sound, and in between fades from one to the other.

If you want a diagram, let me know. Or, look up "spin-a-split" in the Duncan library of wiring diagrams. This is basically the same thing, but with a tapped single coil instead of a humbucker.


mrturtle_91 said:
sweet! I agree on the tapped QP. You can get twangy Tele tones, and hot humbucker-like tones as well, it's awesome. Just an all around awesome tele.
Click to expand...

If you like those two sounds, you should hear what lies in between. The variable tap pot is so cool...


Wattage said:
Completely righteous and as funny as can be I learned that cool little solo for Dangerous Type this AM.

Love the guitar, good luck with it.
Click to expand...

I got stuck with a 4-hour layover at O'Hare last week, so as a test to try out my new music-notation software (Finale Notepad, not bad for 10 bucks) , I transcribed that solo, from memory, without a guitar in my hands. Got surprisingly close considering.

The other Easton solo in that same vein that's a big fav is "Bye Bye Love". Short, sweet, and to-the-point.
 
Re: Gentlemen, I give you... the Dangerous Type

I actually thought of doing almost exactly this!

I was going to have a Daphne Blue Esquire with a Maple Fretboard with a QP in it. Stealer!!

;)
 
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