Shaun Krisher has been playing guitar for 15 years and offering his opinions to the world at large for at least 20 years. Shaun is a member of Ken Stanton Music's guitar department at our Marietta location. His column is about answering questions and dispelling the mythology held by guitarists about their gear, getting his information straight from the source: the players that use the gear and the engineers that design it. In between work, playing guitar and shooting photography, Shaun makes time for a wife and two dogs.
Stop in and ask Shaun a question anytime!
How to clean your guitar
Shaun demonstrates how to get that grungy guitar looking beautiful again
1972 Telecaster Comparison & Review
The year was 1972: The Godfather, Watergate, and the final pull out from Vietnam. Ours is a society constantly in flux. So, too, are our musical tastes. Fender had been producing the Telecaster, in some form or another, since 1950. The single coil sound had served them well through the days of Buddy Holly, Steve Cropper, and Jimi Hendrix. But as Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi and Angus Young started plugging their humbucker equipped guitars into Marshall amps, Fender's 'single coil' sound wasn't cutting it.
To show the world that they could do more than just single coil pickups, Fender introduced the Telecaster Custom (now referred to as the 1972 Telecaster Custom, to distinguish it from a previous model, the Custom Telecaster) and the Telecaster Deluxe. In many ways, these models were a direct shot at the Gibson Les Paul. They featured the same controls in the same locations as those found on a Les Paul. The '72 Deluxe featured two Wide-Range humbuckers, designed by Seth Lover, the man who invented the humbucking pickup in 1955 while working for Gibson. The Custom had a Wide-Range in the neck and a standard telecaster single coil pickup in the bridge position. The Custom was then and is now offered in black and sunburst finishes with glossy maple or rosewood fretboards.
In 1972 Fender also updated its fairly new Thinline series of telecasters. The thinline telecasters are semi-hollow ash guitars, with an open chamber and an f-hole in the body. Dwindling supplies of light weight ash had made telecasters uncomfortably heavy, so this chamber also served as weight relief. The original was introduced in 69 with single coils, but was updated in '72 with Wide Range pickups. The thinline got humbuckers, but its controls are still in the basic Telecaster layout: 3 way switch, master volume, master tone. The 1972 Telecaster Thinline comes in natural glossy ash, or 3 color sunburst.
So, these are the guitars we will be reviewing today: the 1972 Telecaster Custom, the 1972 Telecaster Deluxe and the 1972 Telecaster Thinline. Before I started my review, I gave each guitar a full set up, and strung it with D'Addario EXL 110 nickel wound strings. It should be noted that the Custom's pickups needed to be rebalanced to sound their best. Most people prefer their bridge position pickup to be balanced with, or a little hotter than the neck position, not the other way around. So, I lowered the neck humbucker pickup and raised the bridge single coil pickup until their outputs were about even with each other. This significantly improved the sound of the instrument, because the neck position no longer overpowered the bridge position. I also found that on all three test instruments, I 'leaned' the neck pickup towards the higher strings a little, to brighten up the output. Maybe I'm getting old.
Let's get down to business: I plugged each guitar into a 2009 Marshall JCM 2000 DSL with a Marshall 1960A 4x12 cabinet. I also used a Fender 1965 Deluxe Reverb Reissue, with an Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer in front. Yes, I know - my job is just the worst.
Each guitar features that chunky, round C neck that you either love, hate, or haven't thought about at all until just now. The maple necks all feature a glossy finish. I've always been comfortable with telecaster necks. I suppose I have normal sized hands, I don't have sausage fingers or tentacles like some people do. The neck radius on these guitars is 9.5”. It's not super flat and shreddy, which a lot of classic players find tiresome, but it's not so round that you fret out on big bends. These necks won't win any Fender hating converts.
Where the Thinline and Deluxe were smooth and big in the bridge position, the Custom had cut and a nastier kind of grittiness to it. You can really hear the distinction between a solid body and a semi hollow in this comparison. A solid body lends presence, especially on the high end. The semi hollow body design gives a breathiness to each note. The distinction, to my ears, is in the attack, the very beginning of the notes.
All of these are very non-canon Telecasters. Of the bunch, my favorite is probably the Custom. Once you find the balance between the humbucker in the neck and the single coil in the bridge, the resulting tones are very unique. I tend to avoid genre recommendations for guitars. The fact is you can play anything on anything. There's not a 'blues' guitar, or a 'death metal' guitar. Some guitars are more suited to certain styles than others, but it is by no means a hard and fast rule. So pick them up, try them out, and see if they're for you. The fashion and technology may have changed, but our need for great tone hasn't.
What is distortion?
We get this question a lot: What is the difference between overdrive and distortion? At the most basic level, Distortion is overdrive. Overdrive is the process of feeding your amp (or distortion, overdrive, fuzz, etc. pedal) more signal than it is designed to handle. The amp can't handle the signal load, so it clips off the stuff it can't handle. The process by which your amp makes these adjustments is what gives it it's tonal character. Amplifier designers took advantage of this process quickly, and amps were soon designed to distort more easily and provide more control.
If you have a two channel amp, your second channel is probably an 'overdrive' channel. As you turn up the gain, you are basically increasing the signal before it hits the preamp, where it will achieve distortion. This is usually separate from the volume control, which controls signal to the power amp (which can also be overdriven). On 'non master volume' amps, these two controls are one and the same: volume, which controls signal level across the whole chain.
Now, let's talk a bit about pedals, and how they play into this. Pedals allow you to achieve distortion either without overdriving the amp, or by overdriving the amp more easily. By using the distortion knob on the pedal, you dial in the amount of gain you want from the pedal. By using the level knob, you dial in the amount of gain you want hitting the amp.
Lastly, I want to give you visual examples of some overdriven signals, so you can see what you are hearing. Clicking this image will redirect you to the original, found on Wikipedia.