Digging into the details on the legend’s wirings and mods.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will honor and remember the great Jeff Beck by taking a deeper look into his guitar arsenal and analyzing how you can come close ... at least electrically.
It was a really sad day for the music world on January 10, 2023, when Jeff Beck passed away at age 78 from a bacterial meningitis infection. He was, for sure, one of the best and most valued guitarists ever, influencing countless players all over the world with his unique tone and style. I don’t think I have to mention that using the same gear will not make you sound like Jeff Beck—his playing chops are close to unreachable. But it can help you to sound closer to Beck’s tone, so let’s have a look into a few of his guitars that I think are the most important.
When we talk about Jeff Beck’s guitars, we are also talking about pickup mastermind Seymour Duncan, who was a close friend of the guitarist. Duncan is the brains behind many of the guitars that Jeff Beck played during his outstanding career.
1. The Tele-Gib
This is the guitar that started the lifelong friendship between Beck and Duncan back in 1974, when Duncan was working in London as a guitar tech at the Fender Soundhouse. (The Fender Soundhouse was a huge store in London during the ’70s.) You can hear this guitar on “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” from Blow by Blow.
In 1974, when Beck was recording in the CBS studios near the Soundhouse, Duncan restored a butchered 1959 Fender Telecaster to working condition. To combine the best of both worlds, he installed two rewound PAF humbuckers, saved from a smashed 1959 Gibson Flying V that previously belonged to guitarist Lonnie Mack. Because the Telecaster did not have a curved top like a Les Paul, they were installed in flat, white humbucker frames, and since the original Telecaster bridge was missing, Duncan installed a Gibson stop-bar tailpiece and an ABR-1 bridge. Duncan presented this Gibson-ized top-loader Tele to Beck, and he instantly fell in love with it. The rest is history, as they say.
“You can order a Telecaster body with two humbucker routings without any problem. That was not even conceived of back in the early ’70s.”
Building a copy of this guitar is much easier today than it was back in 1974. You can order a Telecaster body with two humbucker routings without any problem. That was not even conceived of back in the early ’70s, so Duncan had to put a lot of work into this guitar. Finding a pickguard with humbucker cut-outs is also no big deal today.
If you want to come close to this guitar, you should choose a Telecaster body made of ash or swamp ash, and a 1-piece maple neck. You also need a stop-bar tailpiece, an ABR-1 bridge, and a standard Telecaster control plate with master volume, master tone, and a standard 3-way pickup selector switch. You can choose any PAF humbucker copy that is close to the ’59 specs—a standard two-conductor wiring will be fine. In the original guitar, the pickups do not have a metal cover, exposing their zebra bobbin arrangement. It’s important to also use pickups without metal covers if you want to get as close as possible. Duncan used 500k pots for volume and tone, along with a 0.047uF tone cap and a standard Telecaster 3-way wiring: bridge/bridge + neck in parallel/neck.
You can use any standard Telecaster wiring diagram for this. It’s a normal Telecaster wiring with two humbuckers—no split, no series switching, no phasing or any other gimmicks. Naturally, you can tweak the wiring to your taste and implement some mods and add-ons. Beck was happy with the guitar the way it was, so it was never modified.
2. The Fender Jeff Beck Stratocaster
The development of the Jeff Beck Stratocaster dates back to 1986 and went on for several years. In 1991, the first series of the Jeff Beck Stratocaster was available—a more or less upgraded version of the Strat Plus, featuring an alder body, a deep C-shape neck with a rosewood fretboard, a Wilkinson roller nut (replaced in 1993 with the LSR roller nut), Sperzel locking tuners (replaced in 1994 with Schaller locking tuners), a two-point tremolo, Lace Sensor Gold single-coil pickups and a HB Lace Sensor Dually at the bridge, and a TBX tone circuit affecting the middle and bridge pickups, plus a mini coil-split push-push button for the bridge-position humbucking pickup.
In 2001, the guitar was updated with Fender Hot Noiseless pickups and a classic tone control, a contoured heel, and locking tuners. In 2004, the Fender Custom Shop released the Jeff Beck Signature Stratocaster with almost identical specs as the 2001 series.
Beck also played other Strats over the years—too many to cover them all. All the materials you would need to build a copy of the two versions mentioned above are readily available today. The wiring of the second version is a standard Stratocaster wiring with a 5-way switch, master volume, and two tone controls. We will talk about the very special wiring of the first version in a future column, along with the wiring of the Fender Strat Plus.
3. The Jeff Beck Esquire
When Seymour Duncan presented Beck with the Tele-Gib hybrid guitar in 1974, it was meant as a gift by Duncan. But a few days after Seymour Duncan gave the guitar to Beck, the guitarist’s manager showed up at the Soundhouse with a wild mixture of three guitar bodies and three necks, from which Beck wanted Duncan to pick one as a gift in return. Duncan chose an Esquire and started putting it back together.
The Fender Esquire with the serial number 1056 was from 1954, and it’s the one Beck played during his stint with the Yardbirds in 1965 and 1966. You can hear this guitar on the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul,” “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” and “I’m a Man.”
The guitar underwent some modifications, the most obvious of which was on the body. It was sanded down and contoured on the front and back like a Stratocaster, exposing the bare wood in spots. The original neck was also changed for whatever reason, and when Duncan received the guitar, it had a neck from 1956. It’s not clear if the Esquire was already modified when Beck bought it back in 1964 or if Beck modified it.
“The Fender Esquire with the serial number 1056 was from 1954, and it’s the one Beck played during his stint with the Yardbirds in 1965 and 1966.”
The basic features of this guitar are a blonde-finished ash body, contoured like a Stratocaster, a 1-piece maple neck with a soft V-shape, a black Bakelite pickguard, an original Fender pickup from 1954, and standard Esquire/Telecaster hardware. The guitar had an extremely light weight of only 6 pounds.
Building a copy should be no problem at all. The original guitar still belongs to Seymour Duncan and is displayed in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in the exact same condition as in 1974.
Another interesting modification is the wiring of this guitar, sporting 250k volume and tone pots and a traditional 3-way pickup selector switch along with the single bridge pickup. In Beck’s Esquire, the 3-way switch is wired like this:
- #1: volume control with a cap only, no tone control
- #2: volume control with a cap and tone control with its tone cap
- #3: volume control only with no cap and no tone control
Sounds familiar? Of course! It is a kind of in-between wiring from the original Fender Esquire circuit and what became famous as the “Eldred wiring” later on. We talked about both of these wirings in detail in the past, but the one in Beck’s Esquire is unique, so I will provide you with the wiring diagram if you want to get as close as possible.
Sadly, we don’t know about the capacitance of the two caps. It’s said that it has a 0.05uF tone cap and a 0.003uF cap in line with the pickup, which sounds plausible to me. Modern versions will read 0.047uF and 0.0033uF, but don’t worry, they will work fine. So here we go:
Fig. 1
That’s it! Next month, we will have a closer look into the treble-bleed network versus booster/fuzz problem and how to solve it, so stay tuned! Until then ... keep on modding!
We’re giving away more gear! Enter Stompboxtober Day 24 for your chance to win today’s pedal from Maxon!
Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Pedal
The Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Effects Pedal may look like your old favorite but that's where the similarity ends. Improved circuitry with a new chip yields the ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive guitarists crave. Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume while the Hi-Boost/Hi-Cut tone controls adjust brightness. Features true bypass switching, a die-cast zinc case, and 3-year warranty. From subtle cries to shattering screams, the Maxon OD-9 delivers a huge range of tones.
Features
Improved circuitry with a new chip yields ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive
Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume
Hi Boost/Hi Cut tone controls adjust brightness
True bypass switching
Die-cast zinc case
AC/DC operation (order optional Maxon AC210N adapter)
Product Specs
Input: 1/4" mono jack
Output: 1/4" mono jack
Power: 9V DC, 6 mA, center pin minus (not included)
Dimensions: (WxDxH) 74 mm x 124 mm x 54 mm
Weight: 580g
Founding Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh has died at 84.
Official statement from Phil Lesh's Facebook page:
He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.
This is a developing story.
Vintage-style reverb, tremolo, and vibrato sounds abound in a 3-in-1 stomp that might be the only box you need.
Here’s part two of our look under the hood of the funky rhythm guitar master’s signature 6-string.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this edition, we’re continuing our journey through the Fender Cory Wong Stratocaster wiring, bringing it all together.In the previous installment, the last feature on the funky 6-stringer’s signature axe that we discussed was the master volume pot and the corresponding treble-bleed circuit. Now, let’s continue with this guitar’s very special configuration of the tone pots.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!