Week #3 of my Breezysound honeymoon ramblings...
I already wrote
here about the special fret/fretboard edge treatment these guitars obviously got and I made some clips demonstrating the pickups, mostly with crunch amp settings.
Rolled fretboard edges and plugged fret slots
What I didn't check or use so far was the plain clean sound of the guitar, particularly the bridge pickup. Here's a demonstration and comparison with a Strat bridge pickup (LF Blues Special, 7.1kΩ), in the style of an oldschool beer commercial (stereotypical) music bed - as per usual only the guitars were changed, the amp model (Twin Reverb, what else?) and its settings were the same:
0:00 - Full mix clip
0:33 - Strat bridge pickup
0:55 - TEB bridge pickup
Now I'm not exactly native to "both kinds of music" and I'm not Jerry Donahue, so please forgive me the lackluster performance! That it was particularly lackluster on the Strat was interesting though - I was quite surprised how bone-dry, lap steel-ish and utterly familiar the TEB pickup rang in my ears while recording, and trying the same on the Strat wasn't only surprisingly harder (despite it being much more comfy for bends), it was also lacking all of that pretty inspiring and rewarding "stereotype" vibe, IOW it wasn't fun. Talk about "Strats and Teles basically sound the same"! Puzzling though that they often do sound strikingly similar in YT videos?
About TEB pickups
That made me do a little research on the history of Telecaster pickups and some guesswork about the TEBs - the TEB bridge pickup could be a clone of the pickup from the era when the "Telecaster" got its name, or some oddball "hybrid":
The (unloaded) TEB bridge DC resistance measures unusual 8kΩ (7.98kΩ to be precise) in my Breezy, which is the first giveaway as to why it has that "lap steel" character - that's pretty hot! But all TEB bridge pickups I could find with a DC-R reading were between 7.1 and 7.5kΩ, so this might be an outlier, even if I add 2.5%/200Ω for "loaded" measurements on the output jack for the other TEB pickups. It may have contributed to my impression though:
The very early Esquire and Broadcaster models got an only marginally adapted pickup from Fender's "Champion" lap steel guitar, measuring up to 10kΩ (but generally all over the place). Then Fender changed the enamel wire to formvar and used 42AWG instead of 43AWG, so the resistance dropped to more like 7.5kΩ. Of course pickup winding wasn't an exact science back then and many pickups ended up with a lot less wire and lower resistance in the 6.7kΩ ballpark, which soon became pretty much the standard for the bridge as it seems.
1953 Fender Champion
To find out what year exactly the TEB represents we'd need to measure the magnetic flux density: Around 1954 changed the magnet slugs from AlNiCo-III to AlNiCo-V, initially flush and then staggered in 1955. Comparing the output level to the AlNiCo-V "Blues Special" in my Strat my guess would be AlNiCo-V for the TEB as well, so that would be 1954. AlNiCo-V with less wire on the coil would make the pickup considerably brighter, much more like a Strat pickup and that may explain the ubiquitous impression that they are not so different!
The TEB
neck pickups seem to be pretty strange: At 6.0kΩ (my example) the DC-resistance is lower than regular T-style pickups, and 5.9kΩ is also what I found consistently on the other TEB pickup sets. Now Telecaster neck pickups tend to be controversial, not only on Tokais but I understand why people say that they're nothing to phone home about - I had to raise it very much to make it sound OK and the output matching the bridge better - but it's still only OK-ish to me.
The TEB pickups seem to be somewhat unique (or should I say "odd"?) anyway: A big share of the "vintage"-labeled aftermarket pickup sets have (interesting link)
bridge pickups in the 6.5-7kΩ range and generally neck pickups above 7kΩ to begin with. Apart from a few super hot or stacked "speciality" pickups, 7.5kΩ is pretty much the hottest you can get for a bridge pickup in a vintage set and none of them has a neck pickup as low as 6kΩ as it seems
(Edit: The Fender CS "Twisted Tele" set is much like that!). The TEBs are just the other way around, and that might explain why the comparatively hot bridge TEB appears to have a much better reputation than the neck pickup.
Obviously, TEBs wouldn't be the "correct" pickups for a 1964 "Custom Telecaster" model either, which would have staggered magnets in the bridge position and could even have gotten the enamel wire that was re-introduced in 1964 - but I'm pretty glad that they didn't go that far. BTW, staggered magnets would also be a dead giveaway for a pickup swap in any old Breezy.
1963 Custom Telecaster bridge pickup
Anyway, I think I understand much better now why some of you guys couldn't stop buying Tokais after getting the first one!
I still want to find the blue 1982 maple neck sibling of my TE-70!