Citation:
Steve Morse's Quest For Fire
Rewiring Your Tele For Fun & Aggravation
By Jock Baird
Very few guitarists or bassists find their perfect pickup combination quickly. It's a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back process, and even the best players do their share of groping. Take Steve Morse and the Telecaster-actually a Tele body grafted to a Strat neck-he wielded for most of his stints with the (Dixie) Dregs, the Steve Morse Band and Kansas. Almost as soon as he got it, he started rewiring it.
"The two standard Tele pickups were fairly thin, especially the neck pickup, and to top it all off, the original Tele was wired through a capacitor on that pickup, to make it sound bassier than it really was. The three-position switch was lead [bridge] pickup, regular neck and the neck pickup with the capacitor. That's what a Tele was, but that was mainly for clean sounds, country or clean rhythm. So it didn't work for me."
Morse took a P.A.F.-type humbucker off a Gibson ES-335 and mounted it in the neck position. This is a common spot to mount Gibson humbuckers on guitars with wider Fender string spacing, because only near the neck do the strings get close enough together to work with the narrower spacing. But even though the Tele started to roar, he faced another problem under the bridge: "The pickup there was feeding back at the high end. There's just no way around it. Some people pot them in plastic or wax, but that's about all you can do. And even worse, this pickup was part of a big metal plate that had a bridge consisting of three tuning pieces, instead of six, to adjust the strings with. I figured, 'Well I can't tune it and I can't play loud, so this thing has got to go!' A lot of purists would've killed me, but this was my guitar and I was trying to make it work for me."
Morse decided on a Fender humbucker: "It was a good pickup, and it had the wider F-spacing, which is another reason I thought it would work better. And it did. So at first I just had two humbuckers there. But then I discovered that the Tele neck pickup I'd taken out worked really well near the bridge, so I put it right next to the Fender humbucker, touching it. So then that was three. And by that time I'd added another switch to get more combinations."
Now Morse's pickup configuration, from bridge to neck, ran Fender humbucker, old Tele neck, a blank spot and the Gibson humbucker. But the blank spot didn't stay blank for long: "Bartolini came out with a hex pickup, a humbucking-shaped pickup with six outputs," continues Morse. "I said, 'This is for me! I'm going to have at least a stereo pickup.' And so I put that in and messed around with it. But it didn't have as much separation as I thought-which was partly my fault, because the only space I had left was up near the neck and the closer to the bridge you put a hex, the better the separation. But there was an amazing amount of experimentation with the Bartolini, and I think I soldered that thing about a million different ways. I wired it in series, parallel, split-coiled.... I didn't use the out-of-phase trick, though; I didn't like the effect for anything I could think of playing."
The number three spot became Morse's permanent audition position. "After the Bertollini, I tried a Mighty Mite pickup, and that went away. I finally ended up with an adaptor plate, and a Strat pickup I mounted on an angle, trying to get a little more high end on the top strings. I used it for softer rhythm sounds. Then I found a DiMarzio Strat-type which sounded better." As Morse's relationship with DiMarzio warmed, he suggested designer Steve Blucher take another look at that old Fender humbucker. "It gave me a very unique, amazing tone, especially down low. It caused me to use the low strings a lot in solos. It was fatter and had more mid-range than any Fender pckup. The only problem it had was that I was playing in a loud band and in some clubs we'd be so close to our equipment that it would feed back, too. Well, I'd played a Les Paul and I knew that problem could be overcome.
"And so I got with Steve and I gave him the pickup and said, 'Can you make this stop squeaking, and give me just a little more volume on the high strings?'" The result is a new DiMarzio Steve Morse humbucker, and his four-pickup configuration is now standard on the Music Man guitar Morse now uses and endorses.
The idea, offers Morse, is to "combine the single- and double-coils for a sound you can't get any other way." As for his switching: "I prefer big switches that I can use constantly in flight, so to speak, as opposed to little temperamental switches that have to be set in the middle position, things that could only be done by taking you finger and placing it in position. I want something I can bang with the side of my hand while I'm playing."
For distortion, Morse always goes to one or both of the two humbuckers, but he advises against super high-output distortion pickups that can't clean up: "I use the volume control as a tone control. Try slowly turning down the volume control when playing through a distorted amp. Because the front end of the amplifier is compressing the sound, for a little while it's not going to make any difference in the volume coming out of the speakers. All it's going to do is remove some of the threshold, where the front end is just starting to overload, will the volume start to come down.
"So the way the pickups act with volume control is important. And that's why I don't want the highest-output pickups, because those don't clean up as well. I like something I can turn down the volume on and get a totally different sound."
