198 – 200119 ZT-Tele – Zachary Handcrafted Guitars | Bass| Pedals | Strings

Inspiration

Each ZT I build I think is the best ZT I have ever built. This is no exception.

I really wanted to build a guitar out of Butternut wood. I have a few pieces of this wood but did not get around to it, until this guitar. Butternut is a type of Walnut but even lighter and softer. It makes for a light weight, resonant guitar.

I also followed the vintage vibe of the Telecaster prototypes by using that early Fender pickguard shape and by imbedding the control cavity into the pickguard, as found on the first version of the Precision bass.

What's interesting about this guitar is that instead of having a Fender scale, it has a vintage Gibson scale of 624 cm, which is actually shorter than the claimed 24 3/4".

So here you have a Telecaster with a Gibson scale length and really tall and wide Stainless frets. I don't think you would want to play an actual Vintage Tele or a reissue of a Vintage Tele. It just would not cut it and you would realize it very quickly.
The body has all the comfort cutouts and the neck is Walnut. This is a whole other world than what you have ever experienced.

Another interesting thing is the neck pickup. This is wound by me but its an interesting twist on a P90. It is wound with 38 gauge wire ( instead of the usual 42 gauge), 38 gauge is a much thicker wire. This is the same wire used on the original Gibson Charlie Christian pickups of the 30s, which was the first pickup Gibson made and proceeded the P90. So this is built as a P90 but with CC spec wire coil and I used AlNiCo 3 magnets. The result is a chimy pickup, with great clarity, which sounds different from a normal P90. (read a description of this pickup below)

So here you have it. The best Tele you will never play.
All you wonderful people with Tele guitars out there. You have no clue what you are missing. and maybe that is for the better.

It's not just the blade, but the whole construction and sound of the pickup.

The originals used huge cobalt steel magnets, (the two long bars in the picture below.) They actually played a major role in holding not just the pickup together, but attaching it to the guitar's top.
These magnets had to be so big, because cobalt steel magnets of the 30's were very low gauss, So even with those big magnets, there wasn't much magnetic force.

The wire was 38 gauge(!) which is essentially, a huge wire. No one uses it nowadays, unless replicating this pickup. It's just too big.
In fact it's so big, they couldn't get many wraps around the bobbin before it would be full.

It was a revolutionary design, but not very efficient. It weighs 2 lbs., takes a long time to build, is particularly prone to breakdowns and noise.
I've also heard that the cobalt steel magnets lose magnetism much more than in later pickup designs, (can't confirm that, though.)

As a result of the wire and magnets, even though it was a huge pickup, it generally only had a DC resistance of 2.5-4k ohms, with plenty of examples reading around 1-1.5k.

But the thing is, all these features combined to create a very unique sound. The appealing thing about the Charlie Christian pickup is that it has a lot of power and warmth, but also a lot of clarity and responsiveness. It doesn't have the output of a distortion pickup, but it does put out a good amount of volume, often comparable to a P-90 with a much higher DC reading.

People compare them to P-90's in tone, and while this is true to some extent, to my ear, they're a much more complex tone with a greater frequency range and clarity. It's hard to find another pickup with the same combination of warmth and clarity.

This is why so many jazz and blues players hold it in such high regard.

Some winders have managed to substitute strong, much smaller AlNiCo magnets for the original steel bars.
I'm sure there's a lot more work that goes into it, however, in order to maintain that unique tone and not turn it into a P-90 with a blade.

Charlie Christian, T-Bone Walker, Oscar Moore, Barney Kessel, Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, and many, many more are among the players who made it so famous. Gibson even offered it as an option for 20 years after they stopped using it on production models, and they brought it back in the 70's for the ES-175CC.

In the 70's and 80's, Danny Gatton re-popularized it, and also showed it could be surprisingly versatile. It even sounds great with some overdrive. Lot's of guys like Redd Volkert, Vince Gill and other country and rockabilly players have discovered what a great neck pickup it makes.

Nothing else sounds quite like it.