I've moved from Les Paul's to Semi-hollow body guitars (Johnny Smith and Carvin) to pointed headed super strats (Hair Metal Red Guild Aviator), custom 7 strings and finally ended up with Fenders I first fell in love with a Strat and eventually a Tele.
The Telecaster was such a simple and straight forward guitar, but had a sound that just grabbed me. Even though I'm a basic "classic rocker" the twang of the Tele is magnetic, and even lends an interesting flavor in a straight ahead rock environment. Needless to say the Tele has been my main guitar for years... but every once in a while I want to try something different and move to other guitars to try new things. I've finally decided to pickup another Tele to use as an experimentation guitar. That new Telecaster (Transparent Crimson Red American Standard) is the one pictured here.
I wanted to take a few pictures before I started to dig in. I'm going to add Schaller strap locks, locking tuners and a Stetsbar whammy bar. [Note 08/08/2009: I've opted to go with a Bigsby B5 for the Telecaster. You can purchase springs of various tension, which will support my heavy strings (.012's).] Then I'll take it over to The Music Box and have their tech (Mark Wybieralla) refret the guitar with jumbo stainless steel frets. I use heavy strings and the stainless steel jumbos make bending tolerable. Mark does great fret work. Finally I'm going to go with a modified Nashville configuration by adding a P90 as a middle pickup. I haven't decided exactly how I'm going to wire this up, and routing out the guitar cavity is scary so I'll probably noodle this for awhile before I pull the trigger.
Let me know what you think...
