Bruce Springsteen and his heavily modified
’50s Esquire on the cover of his 1975 classic,
Born to Run.After our brief exploration of the
Esquire’s history and tone [“Fender
Esquire Basics,” May 2012], we’re ready to
turn our attention to modifying this iconic
guitar. If you’re looking for ways to make the
circuit more flexible or better suited to your
sonic needs, you’ve come to the right place.
Now, I’ll admit it took me some time to
get comfortable with our first mod. It was
so simple, I couldn’t fully embrace it—at
least at first: Simply connect the two pickup
wires to the output jack, bypassing the
switch and all the guitar’s electronics. Solder
the pickup’s white (hot) wire to the tip of
the output jack, and the pickup’s black
(ground) wire to the sleeve—that’s it!
Before you accuse me of forgetting to
take my meds or going completely insane,
let me explain. When I received an Esquire
from a customer requesting this mod, I
thought, “That’s crazy!” But after I did the
mod, I had to keep the guitar in the shop
for a few days before I sent it back. After
playing it for a while, I concluded that
an Esquire modded this way—running
through a volume pedal and stompbox
EQ—is a serious sonic weapon with tons
of tone. (My personal choices are a George
Dennis GD020 volume pedal and a Monte
Allums-modded Boss GE-7 EQ.)
Sure, the control plate with the pickup
selector switch and two knobs becomes
merely cosmetic, and you don’t have any
options for shaping your tone directly from
the guitar. But it only takes a short time
to fall in love with this configuration, and
you’ll start using your fingers and hands
more—exploring different damping techniques
and ways to pluck the strings—to
shape the tone. Because the guitar’s electronics
are bypassed, you hear the pure
pickup tone, which is noticeably louder,
more gutsy, and offers more high-end bite
than the standard factory wiring.
This is a mod for the minimalist—
someone who is looking for a pure tone.
Sometimes less is more, so give it a try. If you
don’t like this mod, it only takes a few minutes
to reverse it. Also, you can fine-tune this
tone by varying the length and make of your
guitar cable. A longer cable adds more load
to the circuit and will bleed off some highend
to ground. Also, a high-capacitance cable
will bleed even more high-end to ground, so
this is another area for experimentation. The
external volume pedal gives you full control
over your level, and if you need additional
sounds, the stompbox EQ makes a very versatile
and powerful tone control.
The Esquire’s 3-way switch provides
another area for modding—especially position
No. 3. As you may recall from last
month’s column, in this position the pickup
is routed through the volume control with
the tone pot bypassed and a fixed “treble
roll-off ” capacitor/resistor network engaged
instead. In stock form, this yields a very
dark preset tone, which Leo Fender hoped
would encourage guitarists to throw in
some bass lines or even allow them to sub
for a bass player in a band.
In a typical Esquire, we have three 0.05
μF caps and a 3.3k resistor. (To see the
schematic for the original 1950 Fender
Esquire, go to premierguitar.com and look
for last month’s Mod Garage column.) As
you may remember from our countless
Strat Mod Garage columns, experimenting
with caps and resistors is a great way to
explore sound and refine your tone.
In early-’50s Esquires, Fender used three
0.05 μF/150V paper-waxed caps made
by Cornell Dubilier, plus either an Allen
Bradley or Stackpole 3.3k/1W carboncomposition
resistor with a tolerance of
5 percent. If you want a strictly vintage
sound, these are the parts you should use, or
at least approximate.
But you’re not limited to vintage-style
components. You can use a different type of
cap for all three caps—paper-in-oil, ceramic,
film/foil, silver mica, and Styroflex. Feel
free to experiment and go wild. For the
resistor, you can try metal film or carbon
film as an alternative, and you can use
smaller wattages to make it easier to place
the resistor inside the control cavity. It’s
difficult to find the original paper-waxed,
new-old-stock (NOS) capacitors, but the
resistor shouldn’t pose a problem.
Personally, I like 715P or 225P Orange
Drop caps and metal-film resistors in
Esquires. Similar to the original paperwaxed
caps from the ’50s, the P-series
Orange Drop caps have a nice scooped
midrange and provide the signature Fender
tone we know from these guitars.
You may find it very challenging to stuff
three 715P Orange Drop caps into a standard
Esquire or Tele cavity. These caps are
made to handle 600V and are fairly bulky.
The 225P series makes an excellent alternative
because they’re noticeably smaller due
to their 100V rating. The different voltage
ratings of these caps will not make any
tonal difference in a guitar, so don’t worry.
We’ll continue next month with more
Esquire mods. Until then, keep on
modding!
Dirk Wacker lives in
Germany and is fascinated
by anything related to old
Fender guitars and amps.
He plays country, rockabilly,
and surf music in two
bands, works regularly as a
session musician for a local studio, and writes
for several guitar mags. He’s also a hardcore
guitar and amp DIY-er who runs an extensive
website—
singlecoil.com—on the subject.