Will a Strat Little '59 Neck Pickup fit in a Tele neck route?

[Cheery Zeery]

I'm about to make a purchase and need to act fast because I only just found out there is no neck equivalent of the Little 59 pickup for Teles. I don't intend to have a pickguard for this particular build (i.e. I intend to have it mounted to the wood). Any and all advice is welcome.

EDIT: I realize I may not be specific enough -- it's top-routed and it's got vintage tele routes. I haven't found a bridge for it either, but if possible I don't want to use the traditional tele bridge plate, and would rather have something akin to the American Standard Flat Mount, although I also recently learned that that's not compatible with this body.

 

[teleme01]

i dont know the answers to your question but thought i would ask if you bought one of the unpainted sale bodies

 

[Cheery Zeery]

No, this one is definitely already painted.

 

[TBurst Std]

AFAIK. Nope
Strat and Tele neck pups have different footprints

 

[stratamania]

No, a Tele neck rout would need to be rerouted to fit a Strat size pickup.

You could use the SD Vintage Stack for Tele neck with it. (Great pickup by the way)

Vintage Stack® Tele | Seymour Duncan

Our Vintage Stack Tele pickups offer up unmistakable Telecaster sparkle and spank without the traditional hum.

www.seymourduncan.com

SD also offer this as a set with the Lil 59 for Tele.

Little '59™ Tele Set Pickup | Seymour Duncan

Give your guitar noiseless Telecaster pickups with a full sounding, medium output humbucker tone in the bridge position with the classic deep honk you love in the neck, without any hum.

www.seymourduncan.com

Does your body have the Vintage Tele rout with the four mounting holes?

Guitar Bridge Routs

Default Description

warmoth.com

If that is the case this Gotoh fits that Vintage Tele rout - again an excellent bridge for the money.

Gotoh Standard Tele® Bridge - Tele® Bridges - Fixed Bridges - Guitar Bridges - Hardware

<p> This beautiful bridge features a 1/8" thick brass plate with vintage spec mounting and string-thru holes. </p> <h5> Details </h5> <ul class="bullets"> <li>Each saddle is fully adjustable for intonation and string height.</li>

warmoth.com

 

[Cheery Zeery]

Yay, thanks for the responses!

I do want the humbucker in the bridge, so I'm thinking about what the best neck pickup to go with it would be if I were to order all in one go from Warmoth. The body does indeed have the vintage tele rout with four mounting holes, but I was hoping for an option that would allow me to drill as few holes as possible. This is part of why I'm looking to direct mount the pickups and not have a pickguard. That bridge plate is pretty much perfect except I want this to not have the plate covering the area.

Some of you may already have guessed why I'm so insistent on having so much of the body visible but I'm trying to keep it under wraps

 

[Ace Flibble]

Seymour Duncan make the Hot Rails in a Tele neck size, and if you wire that up parallel you get a sound fairly similar to the Little 59, though with a little less treble and a bit more in the lower-mids. Don't wire it in series or it'll completely overpower the Little 59 (and just about any other bridge pickup). Their Custom Shop can make any side-by-side humbucker you want in a Tele neck size, too, of course at a premium.
Be aware that all of the Seymour Duncan (and DiMarzio, come to that) single-size humbuckers—both side-by-side and stacked designs—are taller than vintage pickup spec. If you mount them to the body tightly then they should be low enough to clear the strings, but there's no guarantee they won't be so close the magnets pull on the strings.
(As far as I'm aware, the older generations of Fender Vintage Noiseless are the only hum-cancelling Tele pickups which are vintage height.)

As for the bridge, you can get lots of 'chopped' Tele bridges which act essentially like the Strat hardtails, leaving the pickup to be mounted by other means. You can get them for any kind of bridge mounting pattern and string placement, just look on any guitar hardware shops in your country.

To be honest, it sounds like you'd be better off ordering a modern-spec body, unless you absolutely can not live without the recessed rear ferrules and flat jack of the vintage spec body.

 

[Rick]

So ... you want a humbucker in both the neck and bridge. And you want something like lil 59 in the neck and you’ve just discovered that you’re stuck with traditional tele routing but you don’t want a traditional tele bridge. That’s a conundrum. I’d get a tele set you like, or something like a hotter dimarzio tele set or a “real” bill lawrence set and get at the humbucker ish sounds thru the use of switching, like using a freeway switch to get some series combinations. A great looking bridge is the gotoh tele half cutaway bridge with brasss saddles. Intonates great and the half sides protect the the saddles from shifting when you get your Pete Townsend on. And there are no sides where you might be picking.

 

[Cheery Zeery]

Full disclosure now that I was able to work together the funds for it: I got the final Chimera flake tele body! I'm really happy I got it, but I do have a standard MIM Tele, so I did want something to differentiate it somewhat. I ended up taking stratamania's suggestion on the neck pickup, it seems like the canonical fit. I really do want to sparkle to shine as much as possible so that's why I want to leave so much of the finish exposed. I do get the logic that this probably makes more sense if you have a lam top of some kind, but the Chimera flake really speaks to me.

Another reason I was so bent on humbuckers is (aside from having an Orville LPC as my primary recording guitar), a few months ago, I got a neck off the showcase that I think was someone's return: it has a candy apple red headstock with what basically amounted to LP specs. 59 neck profile, mahogany, ebony fretboard, cream binding, white pearloid block inlays, etc. Whoever returned that neck was really creative and I liked that. I felt that this neck was calling for the Chimera body, so that's why I wanted to jump on it. Way too serendipitous!

I think I'll be happy with the pickups, but as Rick states, the bridge is what I'm thinking of right now. I'll need to check, but I might have a cutoff bridge somewhere...

I'm far from being someone that lives on the 12th fret and above though, I'm a rhythm guitarist at best who will chord up the neck only if necessary, never for the theatrics. To be clear, I do not expect this to do what my LPC does, in that I don't expect it to sound the same. I think more realistically, I love the tele shape but am not totally after the tele twang in this case. Just looking for something that will allow me to continue doing what I do!

Thank you all for your inputs by the way, you're all nice people

 

[stratamania]

Full disclosure now that I was able to work together the funds for it: I got the final Chimera flake tele body!

Well done. I had a good idea that was what you were going for and pretty much certain after post 6.

I knew it was still in the showcase at the time, as I was toying with buying it myself but I really did not need it right now. So glad someone on the forum got it etc.

Look forward to seeing your build pics etc.

 

[Cheery Zeery]

Thanks for giving me the time to get it in that case, I wasn't sure if I was going to be too late waiting past the weekend!

 

[stratamania]

Thanks for giving me the time to get it in that case, I wasn't sure if I was going to be too late waiting past the weekend!

Thanks for giving me another reason not to buy it

I have a couple of projects still to do, so it would have sat in limbo for who knows how long.

 

[Rick]

I wonder how the body would look if you had it routed for the pups you want.

 

[Cheery Zeery]

For this build, I think I'm relatively happy with what I actually ended up with.

That said, I'll be honest: I'm actually kind of an odd duck in that regard. Someone somewhere may identify me based on this, but my main two guitars are a Jazzmaster and the LPC I mentioned before. The Jazzmaster is the guitar I planned on/still plan on using for actual gigs (COVID put a stop to that for a while). It's a modified J Mascis Jazzmaster with a Strat neck and a Kent Armstrong Jazz Bass pickup in the middle. At the time I had it installed I asked for it to be wired like what I thought a 3-pickup Black Beauty would have been wired to (Neck -> Middle + Bridge out of phase -> Bridge). My ideal guitar would probably have something like a J-P configuration (take any guitar with a swimming pool route and see how it treats you!).

 

[Cheery Zeery]

Not to bump my own topic, but just wanted to get some reassurance from some people while I wait for this thing to arrive. I'm kinda looking at this build as a time capsule of 'today', what with the neck having so many modern features (glow-in-the-dark side dots, stainless steel frets, locking tuners etc.), I was thinking of getting a Mastery bridge, specifically the M7. Has anyone installed this bridge on a vintage-style body before? I'm told it should work with a 4-hole setup, but I just really want to make sure.

 

[stratamania]

According to Mastery the M7 is for a 4 hole vintage spec, which the body you ordered from Warmoth is.

Normally I would not comment on the price of parts as at the end of the day it is a personal choice, but perhaps for $180 perhaps you should contact Mastery and get them to verify the question. A half tele bridge can be sourced for about $35 e.g. https://www.philadelphialuthiertool...t-off-telecaster-bridge-with-3-brass-saddles/

 

[Cheery Zeery]

I continue the search for the actual half tele bridge I already own...I swear I had it somewhere. I guess I was taken by the hype and reputation of the mastery bridge on offsets. Does the tele incarnation of it make any meaningful difference?

Also, to Mastery's credit, they responded within two minutes of my initial email, but what was sent to me was a screenshot of the M7's dimensions. I'm impressed by the speed of the response, but given I don't have the physical body yet, I can't exactly verify.

 

[stratamania]

Does the tele incarnation of it make any meaningful difference?

It would not make any difference to me. But that's me.

Scroll down at the below link to Tele Vintage bridge routs and take a look at the dimensions to verify.

Guitar Bridge Routs

Default Description

warmoth.com

 

[Cheery Zeery]

Off by a very small amount but if watching copious amounts of Ted Woodford has taught me anything, those things might matter.

Rout:

Mastery bridge:


Could be I'm overthinking it — it's three decimal places, after all.

 

[stratamania]

I am not sure why they have a .846 spacing, as .850 would be the standard vintage measurement. Also, the string through holes have a slightly different dimension.

Sorry, but I have no idea who Ted Woodford is.