Diagram of the Jeff Beck Esquire wiring
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!
Effects Bakery MECHA-PAN BAKERY Series MECHA-BAGEL OVERDRIVE
Konnichiwa, guitar lovers! 🎸✨
Are you ready to add some sweetness to your pedalboard? Let’s dive into the adorable world of the Effects Bakery Mecha-Pan Overdrive, part of the super kawaii Mecha-Pan Bakery Series!
🍩 Sweet Treats for Your Ears! 🍩
The Mecha-Pan Overdrive is like a delicious bagel for your guitar tone, but it’s been upgraded to a new level of cuteness and functionality!
Effects Bakery has taken their popular Bagel OverDrive and given it a magical makeover. Imagine your favorite overdrive sound but with more elegance and warmth – it’s like hugging a fluffy cat while playing your guitar!
Loopers can be complex enough to make beginners cry. They are fun if you have time to venture for whole weeks down a rabbit hole. But a looper that bridges the functionality and ease-of-use gap between the simplest and most maniacal ones can be a sweet spot for newbies and seasoned performers both. The JamMan Solo HD lives squarely in that zone. It also offers super-high sound quality and storage options, and capacity that would fit the needs of most pros—all in a stomp just millimeters larger than a Boss pedal.
Fast Out of the Blocks
Assuming you’ve used some kind of rudimentary looper before, there’s pretty decent odds you’ll sort out the basic functionality of this one with a couple of exploratory clicks of the footswitch. That’s unless you’ve failed to turn down the rhythm-level knob, in which case you’ll be scrambling for the quick start guide to figure out why there is a drum machine blaring from your amp. The Solo HD comes loaded with rhythm tracks that are actually really fun to use and invaluable for practice. In the course of casually exploring these, I found them engaging and vibey enough to be lured into crafting expansive dub reggae jams, thrashing punk riffs, and lo-fi cumbias. Removing these tracks from a given loop is just a matter of turning the rhythm volume to zero. You can also create your own guide rhythms with various percussion sounds.
Backing tracks aside, creating loops on the Solo HD involves a common single-click-to-record, double-click-to-stop footswitch sequence. Recording an overdub takes another single click, and you hold the footswitch down to erase a loop. Storing a loop requires a simple press-and-hold of the store switch. The sizable latching footswitch, which looks and feels quite like those on Boss pedals, is forgiving and accurate. This has always been a strength of JamMan loopers, and though I’m not completely certain why, it means I screw up the timing of my loops a lot less.
Many players will be satisfied with how easy this functionality is and explore little more of the Solo HD’s capabilities. And why not? The storage capacity—up to 35 minutes of loops and 10 minutes for individual loops—is enough that you can craft a minor prog-rock suite from these humble beginnings. Depending on how economical your loops are, you can use all or most of the 200 available memory locations built into the Solo HD. But you can also add another 200 with an SD/SDHC card.Deeper into Dubs
Loopers have always been more than performance and practice tools for me. I have old multitrack demos that still live in the memory banks of my oldest loopers. And just as with any demos, the sounds you create with the Solo HD may be tough to top or duplicate, which can mean a loop becomes the foundation of a whole recorded song. The Solo HD’s tempo and reverse features, which can completely mutate a loop, make this situation even more likely. The tempo function raises or lowers the BPM without changing the pitch of the loop. As a practice tool, this is invaluable for learning a solo at a slower clip. But drastically altered tempos can also help create entirely new moods for a musical passage without altering a favorite key to sing or play in. Some of these alterations reveal riffs and hooks within riffs and hooks, from which I would happily build a whole finished work. The reverse function is similarly inspiring and a source of unusual textures that can be the foundation for a more complex piece.
HD, of course, stands for high definition. And the Solo HD’s capacity for accurate, dense, and detail-rich stacks of loops means you can build complex musical weaves highlighting the interaction between overtones or timbre differences among other effects in your chain. I can’t remember the last time I felt like a looper’s audio resolution was really lacking. But the improved quality here lends itself to using the Solo HD as a song-arranging tool—and, again, as a recording asset, if you want a looped idea to form the backbone of a recording.
The Verdict
With a looper, smooth workflow is everything. And though it takes practice and some concentration in the early going to extract the most from the Solo HD’s substantial feature set, it is, ultimately, a very intuitive instrument that will not just smooth the use of loops in performance, but extend and enhance its ability as a right-brain-oriented driver of composition and creation.
The Warm Bender dishes these sounds with ease and savage aplomb. Outwardly, it honors the original MkII—a good way to go given that the original Sola Sound unit is one the most stylish effects ever built. But the 3-transistor NOS 75 MkII is only one of the Warm Bender’s personalities. You can also switch to a 2-transistor NOS 76 circuit, aka the Tone Bender MkI. There’s also a silicon 3-transistor Tone Bender circuit, a twist explored by several modern boutique builders. Each of these three voices can be altered further by the crown-mounted sag switch, which starves the circuit of voltage, reducing power from 9 to 6 volts. From these three circuits, the Warm Bender conjures voices that are smooth, responsive, ragged, mean, mangled, clear, and positively fried.
The Compact Wedge Edge
Warm Audio, quite wisely, did not put the Warm Bender in an authentically, full-size Tone Bender enclosure, which would gobble a lot of floor space. But this smaller, approximately 2/3-scale version, complete with a Hammerite finish, looks nearly as hip. It’s sturdy, too. The footswitch and jacks are affixed directly to the substantial enclosure entirely apart from the independently mounted through-hole circuit board, which, for containing three circuits rather than one, is larger and more densely populated than the matchbox-sized circuit boards in a ’60s Tone Bender. Despite the more cramped quarters, there’s still room for a 9V battery if you choose to run it that way. Topside, there’s not much to the Warm Bender. There’s a chicken-head knob for output volume, another for gain, and a third that switches between the NOS 76, NOS 75, and silicon modes. Even the most boneheaded punk could figure this thing out.
A Fuzz Epic in Three Parts
Most Warm Bender customers will find their way to the pedal via MkII lust. If you arrive here by that route you won’t be disappointed. The Warm Bender’s NOS 75 setting delivers all the glam-y, proto-metal, heavy filth you could ask for. It sounded every bit as satisfying as my own favorite MkII clone save for a hint of extra compression that falls well within the bounds of normal vintage fuzz variation. My guess is that when you’re ripping through “Dazed and Confused” you won’t give a hoot.
“There’s more color and air in the NOS 76 mode.”
If the NOS 75 circuit suffers by comparison to anything, it’s the 2-transistor friend next door, the NOS 76. The lower-gain NOS 76 mode is, to my ears, the most appealing of the three. It’s the most dynamic in terms of touch response and guitar volume attenuation and delivers the clearest clean tones when you use either technique. There’s more color and air in the NOS 76 mode, too. Paired with a neck-position single-coil, it’s an excellent alternative for Hendrix and Eddie Hazel low-gain mellow fuzz that’s more like dirty overdrive. The silicon mode, meanwhile, lives on the modern borderlands of the ’60s-fuzz spectrum. It’s super-aggressive and focused, which can be really useful depending on the setting, but lo-fi, spitty, and weird when starved of voltage via the sag switch. It’s deviant-sounding stuff, but extends the Warm Bender’s performance envelope in useful ways, particularly if you hunt for unique fuzz tones in the studio.
There’s a widely accepted bit of wisdom that says most germanium fuzzes sound lousy unless you turn up everything all the way and use your guitar controls to tailor the tone. This is partly true, especially with a Fuzz Face. But in general, I respectfully disagree and present the Warm Bender as exhibit A in this defense. The gain and volume controls both have considerable range and fascinating shades of fuzz within that can still rise above the din of a raging band.
The Verdict
Some potential customers might balk at the notion of a $199 vintage-style fuzz made in China—no matter how cool it looks. But the Warm Bender looks and feels well made. The sound and tactile sensations in the three circuits are truly different enough to be three individual effects, and $199 for three fuzz pedals is a sweet deal—particularly when consolidated in a stompbox that looks this cool. There is a lot of variation in old Tone Benders, and how these takes on the circuits compare to your idea of true vintage Tone Bender sound will be subjective. But I heard the essence of both the MkI and MkII here very clearly and would have no qualms about using the Warm Bender in a session that called for an extra-authentic mid-’60s fuzz texture.
Walrus Audio’s Monumental Harmonic Stereo Tremolo is far from the only modern tremolo pedal that offers stereo panning. And it’s one of many that digitally approximates the elastic, phasey sound of brown-panel Fender harmonic tremolo. But the Monumental’s economical design and compact dimensions conjure memories of PN-2s I’ve known and missed. It brims with features an old PN-2 user could only dream of in the midst of a stereo amp reverie: the harmonic tremolo, a more traditional optical tremolo-style voice, the ability to blend the two, six wave shape options, and a subdivision switch that enables precise rhythmic variations on any given modulation pattern.
Rhythms Carved in Rock
The Monumental is, as any Walrus-watcher will know, is an evolution of theMonument, which was built around harmonic and optical-inspired tremolo voices, and features tap-tempo, subdivisions, and five waveform types. So, the big news here is the stereo capacity, presets, and the ability to blend the harmonic and optical tremolo types. You’ll pay 60 extra bucks for these extended capabilities. But if you really get into using tr-molo to its fullest potential, these are no small matters.
“The big news here is the stereo capacity, presets, and the ability to blend the harmonic and optical tremolo types.”
The Monumental uses the same-sized enclosure as the Monument V2. The only real drawback from this layout is the proximity of the tap-tempo switch to the bypass, and, as I was reminded at a jam last week, I for one, can easily miss my footswitch target if I’m deeply involved in a musical moment. That issue aside, the Monumental is impressive for the way it accommodates stereo in and out jacks, a tap and expression pedal jack, six knobs for volume, wave shape, stereo pan spread, rate, depth, and the optical/harmonic blend. The subdivision button is situated just below these and is easy to access and operate. None of it, save for the footswitches, feels cramped or difficult to navigate.
Soaring Skyward
It’s good that Walrus added presets to the Monumental, because while it can often seem subtle, the deeper you venture into the possible textures, the more detail and difference you hear among them. Waveforms like the square and sine wave sound great at low- and medium-depth settings. Other options benefit from a more-aggressive depth setting. I tended to like the optical and harmonic tremolo voices in their purest forms, but you can find many intricacies to probe and unravel in the blended settings. Some of those differences might go missing in the wash of a dense arrangement, but when they breathe in more spacious musical settings they are lovely. This is especially true when you use the pedal in stereo.
If you don’t intend to use the Monumental in stereo, you should carefully consider whether the presets and blendable voices merit the extra expenditure. For many, they will. But using the Momumental in mono alone means missing out on some of the pedal’s most infectious sounds. While square, sine, sawtooth, and random waveforms sound particularly exciting here, the other waveform types bubble and percolate all over the stereo field, often sounding percussive in optical mode and woozy in harmonic settings. Maximum depth settings sound particularly immersive. You can also enhance the effects of a dramatic stereo spread by equalizing your two amps differently. I boosted the bass and removed most of the treble from a black-panel Fender and did the inverse with a Vox-style amp for my stereo experiments. The resulting combination of detailed pick attack, strong transients, and peaky top-end popping over a fat, rubbery foundation sounded liquid and surreal—even with the pronounced treble peaks in the mix—making an already basically rich tremolo voice sound extra three-dimensional. By the way, yes, I tried the “How Soon Is Now” riff through a stereo setup. And yep, it sounded fantastic.
The Verdict
At $279, you will want to ask yourself how much tremolo you intend to use before you invest in the Monumental. There are certainly simpler ways to swamp-rock. The Monumental also lives at the more expensive end of its category—coming in a little pricier than pedals like the Keeley Hydra and the crazy-feature-rich EHX Super Pulsar. But there’s no contesting the high quality of this USA-made pedal or the thoughtful way the sounds within were conceived. And studio rats and texture obsessives that love the sensation of swimming in a stereo field may find the Monumental worth every penny.
Walrus Audio Monumental Stereo Harmonic Tap Tremolo - Orange
