Name: Steve Kellett
Hometown: Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
Guitar: Made-in-Japsn Japan Telecaster
Here’s the tale of my Fender Made-in-Japan Telecaster: I bought this guitar in 1996 in Hong Kong from the Tom Lee Music Annual Warehouse Clearance Sale. I didn’t hear about the sale until the last day, so by the time I rocked up to the rented factory unit in the depths of Mong Kok, where they were holding the sale, there were only two guitars left: a wrecked, cheap acoustic and a made-in-Japan export model foto flame ’50s Telecaster.
As you can see from Photo 2, the guitar originally had a cherry sunburst finish on the body, but as it dated from ’94 and was one of the first-run foto flames, it had a plain maple V-shaped neck and maple fretboard with vintage-sized frets.
Originally, it had the low-end export electronics: bar-magnet pickups and dime-sized pots. I played it like this for two or three years, and then I got the itch to upgrade the pickups. So, I found a Seymour Duncan Jerry Donahue bridge pickup and a ’52 Fender reissue neck pickup, which I fitted.
Shortly after that, the tone pot disintegrated, so I bought a set of U.S. CTS pots and fitted those. This involved reaming out the holes in the control plate to accommodate the slightly larger pot shafts. To do this, I used a round file and elbow grease. About this time, I also acquired a set of brass bridge saddles to replace the original steel ones. The Telecaster Discussion Page Reissue online guitar forum has a lot to answer for.
Fast forward to about 2010, and the foto flame did what foto flame does: it started to crack. As you can see in Photo 2, it got pretty bad. I tried to address it using superglue, but that just made matters worse.
Photo 2
A couple of months ago, I had just had a local luthier do some repair work on a late ’60s Antoria Soundmaster. When he’d completed that, I asked if he could take the Tele and use veneer to properly achieve the effect that the foto flame had originally achieved. Well, he couldn’t find any decent figured maple veneer locally, but instead we selected some figured movingui and a tobacco sunburst finish base. Photo 1 shows the final result.
While he was at it, he also replaced the neck pickup cover with an open-topped cover exposing the polepieces, and a 4-way switch, giving series and parallel options for the pickup combination. We figured that the original white pickguard wouldn’t look that great with the new finish, so I picked up both black and faux tortoise-shell guards from Musiclily, and after the refinish, we figured that the black guard looked the best. The finished guitar can be seen in Photo 1. What can I say? It is like having a new guitar.
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Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
