How do I get a great tone from my Player Telecaster?
First things first, tone is in your fingers so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
You are unique and you have your own unique way of playing your Telecaster which obviously influences your tone.
However, more likely than not, and hopefully, if your tone is terrible now your tone will improve the longer you play. This is because with time comes experience and confidence which results in knowing how to fret notes and pick strings properly.
With experience you will also learn to listen to yourself (especially by recording some of your practise sessions! ) in a more critical way (but only to see what needs improving, no need to beat yourself about anything).
In the rock world you’ve probably heard the stories of people playing through Eddie Van Halen’s rig hoping to sound like Eddie but when they played they sounded like themselves. Tone is in the fingers.
Check out my current tele tone here
Great Compliments About Guitar Tone
My personal guitar journey for the last few years has been one of solo fingerstyle guitar (a vast difference to the young rocker that I once was!) so my set up has been very simple.
For the last decade or so my main guitar has been an Ibanez AFJ85 hollowbody strung with flatwound Thomastik 11’s which I coupled with a Roland Micro Cube when busking or playing small gigs.
Effects have been very minimal with only the reverb (oh, how I love reverb for that cathedral-like sound) and a touch of chorus if I’m in the mood. Both of those effects are found on the amp.
Despite this simple set up the amount of people that have told me that my tone is beautiful is unreal.
I mention this only to show that you don’t need a load of effects to achieve a great tone.
My First Telecaster
Since I was no longer a rocker my Les Paul was gather dust and since I was playing solo fingerstyle guitar which included jazz and classical tunes I wanted a second back-up guitar that was more suitable for this kind of music.
Having long been a fan of Ted Greene and more recently Tim Lerch I decided to try out a Telecaster.
The ‘using a Telecaster for jazz’ school is now fairly popular and with a few tweaks on the otherwise bright sounding Telecaster you can get a nice warm ‘jazz’ tone fairly easily.
Since I play a lot my guitars get knocked around a little so I generally buy guitars which cost around the $700 mark.
At this price point if the guitars get stolen they aren’t too expensive to replace. Thankfully that has never happened and I have taken photos of the model numbers and stored them on cloud!
So my first, and so far, only Telecaster was a MIM Player Telecaster. Being a lefty the price difference between the Player Telecaster and the Am Pro II, which was the next price level Tele available to me, was around $1,000.
My Player Telecaster Was No Good 
At first I didn’t like my Player Telecaster. It sounded terrible and the neck was fairly unresponsive despite being set up by the shop that I bought the Tele from.
In fact, I despised the Tele so much that I went and bought an Ibanez AS93 which was the other guitar that I was considering when I bought the Tele.
I had asked many people about which guitar I should buy, the Tele or Ibanez, and the overwhelming response was the Tele as it is different from the hollow-body Ibanez AFJ85 which I already had.
By the way, my nearest large guitar shop is a fairly lengthy drive away so I couldn’t try these guitars before I bought them online (a typical lefty problem!).
Once the Ibanez AS93 arrived I loved it straight away and, in fact, tried to sell my Telecaster through a local website!
Thankfully there were no takers as I can’t stop playing my Telecaster now!
My Telecaster Mods
Before discussing the mods that I did to my Tele I must mention that I play fairly thick strings 12-54 round-wounds so your guitar must be set up properly, by yourself or a professional, to handle whatever string gauge that you use.
I also play solo fingerstyle guitar in pop, classical, jazz and Irish styles so I can get away with using heavier strings. If you are in a blues band where you play a lot of lead guitar with lots of bends then a lighter string gauge is probably more suitable for you ( Don’t tell Stevie Ray Vaughan who played 13’s!! ).
I also play in standard tuning but have tried to play half a step down in Eb. This lower tuning suited my fingers better as there is a little more play in the strings but my ears just couldn’t get used to the lower sound and yearned to be back in standard tuning.
Anyway my first few mods were purely aesthetic as I replaced the volume and tone knobs with Roadworn Telecaster knobs and the Player string guide with a circular Roadworn string guide. This made the Tele my own.
I had mentioned Tim Lerch before and I have always appreciated the tone that he gets from his telecaster.
Tim often uses a Lollar Charlie Christian (CC) pick up in the neck position so I thought that I’d try that for that lovely bass sound that he gets.
Installing The Lollar CC Into The Telecaster 
I had a local luthier install the Lollar CC into my Player Telecaster.
He said that installing the pick up was a bit of a pain as due to the extra fret on the fretboard everytime that he wanted to take the pickguard off he had to take off the neck!
There was only a small bit of routing to be done so he took a chisel and made some small adjustments in the cavity. The pickguard also had to be cut as it needed to be adjusted for the new pickup size.
Once the Lollar CC was installed the guitar sounded a lot better but something was still missing.
New Bridge With Brass Compensated Saddles
It took me a while but I finally pulled the trigger on a Callaham bridge with brass compensated saddles.
This was a tricky move as I didn’t know whether the bridge and saddles would improve the sound of the guitar or make it worse.
On top of this I had to order the bridge and saddle combo from another country and got charged import duty on it. This extra cost was included in my decision to buy the Callaham bridge.
Installation of the bridge was very easy as I did it myself. Low and behold when I checked for intonation I only had to adjust one saddle a tiny bit as the other saddles were perfectly intonated. The guitar Gods were with me at last!
Finally I was happy with the sound and I haven’t been able to stop playing my Player Telecaster since.
In addition I have been getting some nice comments about my sound and tone from people online.
I’ll have to take the Tele gigging this summer.
A Few Other Telecaster Settings
Some people like to change the nut however I’m happy with the nut that came with the guitar and how the strings sit in it.
The next mod will probably be the tone control as the curve from bass to treble is currently fairly quick while the treble has a longer line for more variations. I don’t like playing with the tone turned completely down but it’s difficult to fish for tone with the current control.
A great way to get a warmer tone from your Telecaster is to turn the volume knob down somewhere between 5%-10%. Just ease it off when playing and use your ear to find that nice warm sweet spot. By turning the volume knob down a little you lose some of that top end brightness.
One other thing that I must mention is the action which I prefer to be fairly low. I have straightened out the neck on my Player Telecaster a good bit and this gives a nice low action. This is important especially when using thicker strings otherwise you will be working very hard during a 2 hour solo guitar gig!
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Finally, let us know in the comments below how you have set up your Telecaster for optimum tone..
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