Jeff Buckley Telecaster pickups

marcello252

marcello252

Well-known member
as you may hvve noticed from my avatar I'm a big Jeff Buckley fan. Regarding the telecaster he used the most, it had different owners past JB, and it's owned by Matt Bellamy at the moment :

https://reverb.com/it/item/4822520-fender-telecaster-ex-jeff-buckley-1983-blonde

Buckley almost used the neck pickup only, at least in every video I've seen and, for sure, on Live at the Sin-e recording.

The bridge pickup seems a Duncan hot stack for tele, the neck one seems stock, but Bellamy said it sounds strange, maybe 'out of phase', I don't know what could it mean since you hear the out of phase with coupled pickups only, maybe he's referring to the middle position, in case it's possible who mounted the pickup swapped the wires:

https://www.musewiki.org/Fender_'83_"Jeff_Buckley"_Telecaster

Finally, my question: in a '83 telecaster, with that bridge, what kind of tele Fender mounted on neck? 43 awg A5? is there anyone here with a similar pickup mounted to check?

thx
 
marcello252 said:
as you may hvve noticed from my avatar I'm a big Jeff Buckley fan. Regarding the telecaster he used the most, it had different owners past JB, and it's owned by Matt Bellamy at the moment :

https://reverb.com/it/item/4822520-fender-telecaster-ex-jeff-buckley-1983-blonde

Buckley almost used the neck pickup only, at least in every video I've seen and, for sure, on Live at the Sin-e recording.

The bridge pickup seems a Duncan hot stack for tele, the neck one seems stock, but Bellamy said it sounds strange, maybe 'out of phase', I don't know what could it mean since you hear the out of phase with coupled pickups only, maybe he's referring to the middle position, in case it's possible who mounted the pickup swapped the wires:

https://www.musewiki.org/Fender_'83_"Jeff_Buckley"_Telecaster

Finally, my question: in a '83 telecaster, with that bridge, what kind of tele Fender mounted on neck? 43 awg A5? is there anyone here with a similar pickup mounted to check?

thx
Click to expand...
A hot stack has two coils to cancel hum. The two coils may be out of phase with each other if it was wired wrong.
 
Sorry if I bump this old thread of mine, I'm still looking for THAT tele neck sound, which it seems average but, I don't know why, I can't reproduce with my teles and my Fender Princeton amp (ok, not a vibroverb but very close on clean)

I'm not looking for a very vintage tone, neither a modern hot one, just that rounded bell like tone I hear on Buckley's live recordings, a little hollow but not exaggeratedly V-shaped, much different, for example, from a strat tone.

My main tele is a basswood body, maple fingerboard with a Gotoh brass bridge, close to the top mounted one in the Buckley's tele.

Since a '83 telecaster might have a standard tele neck pickup, I tried a SD STR-1 (A5), at the moment it's the best one I've found but WITHOUT the cover only, with the cover on I find it very muddy.

I also tried a fender nocaster set (A3) but the bass was too flubby , then a Tonerider hot set (A3 too) , better but stil not the right bass attack, too wooly, that leads me thinking the right choice is an A5 magnet.

Any idea on what to try next ? a fender pure vintage ? I'd like to stay away from boutique for a so common tone (still a bit too much elusive...)

thank you​
 
Commenting on the sound of the guitar, Matt said “It sounds so weird - it doesn’t sound like any other Telecaster, I’ve had all the electronics analysed - nobody’s changed anything - but the pickups, they think the neck pickup was a mistake by the manufacturer because for some reason it’s slightly out-of-phase, and there’s also something weird about the wiring." This prompted the team over at Manson Guitar Works to investigate the inner workings.
Click to expand...

Have you attempted to contact Manson Guitar Works? Matt doesn't sound too much like he knows what was up to it in this interview.
 
Think the original may have a nickel cover instead of brass? This may explain the clearer sound.

Presumably since 'nobody's changed anything' except the bridge pu, the pots are still 250k?
 
marcello252 said:
...

The bridge pickup seems a Duncan hot stack for tele, the neck one seems stock, but Bellamy said it sounds strange, maybe 'out of phase', I don't know what could it mean since you hear the out of phase with coupled pickups only, maybe he's referring to the middle position, in case it's possible who mounted the pickup swapped the wires:

...
Click to expand...

If he is referring to the middle position, this can happen with SD's if one does not swap the wires. Most SD's are out of phase with stock Fenders and need to have the Hot and Ground wires swapped if one is pairing them together. My Lead II is like this. I went about 15 years without installing a SD with a stock Fender. When I got my Custom Shop X-1, I forgot about this SD/Fender oddity and installed it per a quick look at the wiring diagram. It was immediately obvious once I plugged it in. Fortunately for me, the Lead II has a phase reversal switch. If you see me playing mine, the phase switch is usually in the Up position to be in phase, instead of the Fender lead II default Down position.
 
JamesPaul said:
If he is referring to the middle position, this can happen with SD's if one does not swap the wires. Most SD's are out of phase with stock Fenders and need to have the Hot and Ground wires swapped if one is pairing them together. My Lead II is like this. I went about 15 years without installing a SD with a stock Fender. When I got my Custom Shop X-1, I forgot about this SD/Fender oddity and installed it per a quick look at the wiring diagram. It was immediately obvious once I plugged it in. Fortunately for me, the Lead II has a phase reversal switch. If you see me playing mine, the phase switch is usually in the Up position to be in phase, instead of the Fender lead II default Down position.
Click to expand...

Excellent point. This makes me think that the most likely thing that would make the neck pickup "slightly out of phase" would be that whoever installed the bridge pickup didn’t know about the phase issue, so the middle position is out of phase. The reason why Matt Bellamy called it "slightly" out of phase is because the hotter bridge pickup dominates the middle position to where you can't really hear the necks contribution as well as you could with a volume-matched OOP setup.

I'm really interested in this for some reason, I'm not even a big Buckley fan.
 
Neck pickup from that era should be 43 AWG poly-coated copper magnet wire, wound 8000 times on a plastic bobbin around Alnico V magnets. Wound clockwise, south up magnets, white hot, black ground.

Custom Shop should be able to do that for you easy if you tell them it's a Buckley replica of a stock tele neck from the mid 80s.

When you wire them in, send both black wires to ground and both white wires to hot. Middle position will be out of phase but not hum canceling.
 
Chistopher said:
Neck pickup from that era should be 43 AWG poly-coated copper magnet wire, wound 8000 times on a plastic bobbin around Alnico V magnets. Wound clockwise, south up magnets, white hot, black ground.

Custom Shop should be able to do that for you easy if you tell them it's a Buckley replica of a stock tele neck from the mid 80s.

When you wire them in, send both black wires to ground and both white wires to hot. Middle position will be out of phase but not hum canceling.
Click to expand...

was the cover nickel or brass? nickel, right?
 
After barking up multiple sources, I was put in contact with a guy who worked with multiple people who directly had their hands on the instrument.

The key take aways I got:
  • So many people have owned the guitar and taken it apart to look at the wiring, if the guitar was wired correctly, it would have looked like it was wired out of phase, and at least one person would have advertised it as a quirk of the instrument before they sold it
  • They agree with my theory that the pickups are wired the way that looks correct, but puts the pickups out of phase. It doesn’t sound out of phase because of the volume mismatch
  • The thing that made the neck pickup unique was that it was almost a 1:1 reissue of Fenders 60s Telecaster neck pickup.
  • The neck cover could be brass or nickel, it's a toss up from that era.
  • The most important part of his sound was his Brownface amp
  • If you install a Fender Pure Vintage 64 in the neck and a STK-T2b in the bridge, with both black wires going to ground and both white wires going to hot, you should get what Jeff had
  • It won't sound as over the top as the OOP sounds of a balanced set, but it won't sound as bland as the middle position of an unbalanced in-phase set
 
Chistopher wow!!! Thank you so much!!! load of information here.
I called a friend who can give me a CS tele neck pickup coming from his fender custom shop '63 tele (he put a Peter Florance in it), it might be close enough.
Now the tele hot stack chase starts :)
 
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