The scoop on the rarest of Fender solidbodies.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will have a look at the most weird and elusive Fender guitar ever: the Marauder. We will not only cover some really interesting technical details, but also its history.
I think it’s fair to say that the Fender Marauder, like Gibson’s Moderne, was ahead of its time, and neither guitar made it beyond the prototype stage—at least not as originally designed.
The Marauder’s ’60s production model came with three pickups in a Jaguar-style body, many rocker switches, German carve headstock, and some even with slanted frets. It was later offered as part of the Modern Player series as well as through the custom shop. But the original design and concept of the Marauder was quite different.
In order to see what Leo Fender cooked up in the mid ’60s, we will have to take a short journey back in time, firing up the flux capacitor in our DeLorean with 1.21 gigawatts of energy. Our destination is the Fender factory in California, somewhere between 1963 and 1964—the early beginnings of the space age. The United States worked on the Apollo program at the same time the former Soviet Union worked on the Luna program on the other end of the world. Europe was busy developing and building the Concorde, and Leo Fender, sitting on the porch of his home in Orange County, was ready for his next stroke of genius.
Today, “less is more” is a common approach, not only in the guitar industry. But back then, it was “more is more” and “the more, the merrier.” Leo Fender offered the Esquire with one bridge pickup, and the two-pickup Esquire/Telecaster followed soon after. The next step was the Stratocaster with three pickups, which was mostly influenced by Bill Carson, one of Leo’s favorite guitarist guinea pigs in the ’50s. The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups, and that was exactly the idea behind the Marauder project. There are other guitars with four pickups, like the Japanese-made Teisco/Kawai EG-4T (nicknamed the “Hertiecaster”), or the Italian-made Welson Kinton, Galanti Grand Prix V4, and Eko 500/4V. But Leo Fender went the extra mile with his Marauder concept and installed the pickups underneath the pickguard for a very sleek aesthetic.
“The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups.”
Let’s have a look under the hood: The patent for the Marauder was filed March 6, 1964, and granted December 6, 1966—US patent #3290424—so we can say that developing and prototyping probably started somewhere in 1963. In addition to the four pickups under the pickguard, the original Marauder had a 3-way switch for each of the pickups, plus a Telecaster-style master volume/master tone configuration. On the patent, you can clearly see that the guitar was planned as an offset-type like the Jazzmaster or Jaguar using the same hardware.
There was, however, a one-off prototype built around a Stratocaster that has a dedicated 3-way lever pickup selector switch from the Telecaster and Stratocaster (the 5-way switch was not yet invented then) for each pickup, which looks really weird.
The Pickups
The pickups in the Marauder were designed by a man named Quilla “Porky” Freeman, a Western-swing musician and tinkerer based in Missouri. These large, slightly offset experimental pickups featured a dozen pole pieces and deep armatures, which helped give it a percussive tone. To compensate for the distance from the strings, the pickups were overwound. The patent document clearly states that all four pickups had the same winding direction (phase), but different magnetic polarity. The first (bridge) and the third pickup had south polarity, while the second and fourth (neck) pickup had north polarity, which was a clever move. This was the start of what is known as a “stealth pickup” today, often used as the hidden neck pickup on an Esquire. For such a construction, it’s important that the pickguard material is non-magnetic.
The Switching Matrix
Each of the pickups is connected to its own 3-way on-off-on switch, allowing the corresponding pickup to be on, off, or on with reversed phase, resulting in a total of 48 different sounds between the four. If the idea of these 3-way pickup selector switches sounds familiar, that’s because this is the basic design of Brian May’s “Red Special” guitar that he built with his father Harold in 1963. While that’s the same time frame, it’s close to impossible that Leo Fender knew what Brian May was doing in the U.K., so two geniuses simply had the same idea at the same time.
Here we go with the wiring: The four toggle switches are double-pole on-off-on types, volume and tone are 250k audio, and the tone cap is a 0.05 uF type. To keep the diagram clean, I substituted all ground connections with the international symbol for ground.
Illustration courtesy of Singlecoil
That’s it! Next month, we will talk about a very cool and clever way to integrate a variable dummy-coil into a guitar, so stay tuned.
Until then… keep on modding!
In my guitar shop, players often ask about how to improve the tone in a Tele neck pickup. Here are several ways to address it, including a pickup wiring that removes the tone load in the neck pickup’s switching phase, resulting in a slight high-end boost.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll continue our “no tone control” journey from last month [“Mod Garage: The Scott Henderson S-Style Wiring”] with a cool mod for your Telecaster. Something I hear a lot in the shop is that people aren’t happy with the tone of the neck pickup in their Telecaster. It’s often described as muffled, colorless, lifeless, or similar. Why is this? It’s usually a mixture of three things:
1. The physical location of the neck pickup. You have the same issue on every electric guitar, no matter if it’s a Telecaster, a Stratocaster, a Les Paul, or whatever else. The neck pickup has the warmest tone of them, which is the physical nature of the beast.
2. A standard Telecaster neck pickup has a closed metal cover that’s attached to the pickup’s ground to add some shielding. Because the cover is closed, a good portion of high end will be drained to ground because of eddy currents, even with a thin German silver metal cover.
3. Interestingly, the neck pickup of a Telecaster is often adjusted way too low from the strings for whatever reason. Some players told me that they hit the metal cover with their plectrum, so they adjusted it deeper to get it physically out of the way.
So, let’s see what can be done to address the above problems regarding a Telecaster neck pickup.
Physical location: We can’t outsmart physics and we can’t change the location of the neck pickup inside a Telecaster, so there is nothing we can do here.
Metal cover: We have several possibilities to enhance the tone of the neck pickup. One option is to simply replace the metal cover, which will change the tone noticeably, similar to how moving a carpet or rug away from your amp changes the sound. On the other hand, you lose the shielding abilities of the metal cover. A good compromise is an open-frame pickup cover in the shape of a rectangle with an open top, to break eddy currents. This will enhance the tone while still providing some shielding.
Another solution would be to swap the pickup with a Stratocaster pickup or whatever pickup you like best. But this is not as easy as it sounds. Other pickups have other dimensions, and you will need to reroute the pickup cavity in the body as well as the opening in the pickguard to make them fit. There are a lot of replacement pickguards available that already have such routings for a Strat pickup, so this is not really a problem. A good compromise is a replacement pickup in a Telecaster neck pickup size that offers a different construction under the hood, like the Lollar Royal T Neck that is a Stratocaster-style neck pickup in a Telecaster shape. These are 1:1 ratio replacement pickups, so you don’t have to struggle with new pickguards and routing the Telecaster’s body.
"One option is to simply replace the metal cover, which will change the tone noticeably, similar to how moving a carpet or rug away from your amp changes the sound."
Pickup height: This is super easy to solve: Simply adjust the pickup closer to the strings. The closer the pickup is to the strings, the more high end and volume it will have. We measure the pickup height from the top of the pickup magnet to the bottom of the string while the string is pressed in the last fret with the guitar in playing position. A good starting point for a Telecaster neck pickup is 3.5 mm (9/64") on the low E string and 3.0 mm (1/8") on the high E string. Start with this and listen to what happens when you change the pickup-height adjustment until you find the tone you like best.
I recommend adjusting pickup height first and hear if this does the trick for you. If not, continue with swapping pickup covers or pickups.
As you can see, there are many ways to address the muffled tone of a Telecaster neck pickup if you don’t like it. Here’s another weapon of choice you could try that lies somewhere between the aforementioned strategies. Maybe you adjusted your standard Telecaster neck pickup correctly and now you’re close to being happy with the sound, but it’s still a tad too warm and round for your taste.
Chances are good that this can be solved inside the wiring. Usually, Telecaster players are happy to have a tone control for the bridge pickup that can sound very shrill and ice-picky without one, depending on your playing style and type of bridge pickup. But only a few players really use the tone control for the neck pickup. So how about a wiring with the tone control only affecting the bridge pickup? This way you will get rid of the load of the tone pot (usually 250k) plus the tone cap. Maybe this will give you the tad more high end you’re looking for, so give it a try.
The good news is that you don’t need to change the standard 3-way pickup selector switch like we did on the Stratocaster last month. This is mostly because a regular Tele only has a single master tone control, so we’re happy with the two switching stages of the standard switch you already have in there.
With this wiring, illustrated in Fig. 1, you will end up with these three settings:
1. Bridge pickup with volume and tone control
2. Bridge + neck pickup in parallel with volume for both pickups and tone control only for the bridge pickup
3. Neck pickup with only volume control
To further enhance this wiring, you can use a no-load pot for the tone control. This way you’ll also be able to engage the bridge pickup without tone control if this is an option you want.
That’s it for this round! Next month, we’ll continue with some Danelectro wirings, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!This guitar wiring is special in that the two tone controls are freely assigned, and the tone control is bypassed in the two in-between positions. Let’s go under the hood.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll have a look at the Scott Henderson Strat-style wiring and what it means to bypass the tone control for certain pickup-switching positions.
Bypassing the tone control in a guitar circuit has become popular in recent years, so let’s explore how to do it. We’ve discussed this before in the context of using no-load pots for the tone control. A no-load pot will be electrically out of the circuit when it’s fully opened, so the pot is no longer part of the wiring, and will add no load to the circuit. This way you will have no high-end dampening and the tone is a tad louder, which can be a good thing or not, depending on your personal preferences.
This works great but requires that you open the tone pot(s) if you want this very direct sound. Some players like to have a kind of preset without tone control so there is no additional action they have to take. So, the basic idea of bypassing the tone controls is to transfer it to the pickup-selector switch rather than using no-load pots. There’s no law against combining this mod with no-load pots for the tone control, so you still have the opportunity to use it for sounds where the tone control is engaged.
The credits for this wiring are given to John Suhr, but it’s unknown if he came up with this special wiring during his time as a Senior Master Builder in the Fender Custom Shop, or later, after he started his own business in 1997.
The preset idea is not a new one. Fender has used it since the early ’50s, and the basic idea behind it is still the same. Imagine the following scenario: You’re playing the bridge pickup on your guitar with the corresponding tone pot set to 7 to add some warmth to your tone. In the middle of a song, you need to switch to another pickup that is connected to the same tone pot, but you need the tone pot fully opened to cut through the mix with this pickup setting. Two steps are required now: You need to switch to the desired pickup position, and you need to open the tone pot. Wouldn’t it be nice to have this happen by only dialing in the other pickup position? This is exactly the idea behind bypassing the tone control.
To illustrate, I chose the personal S-style wiring of the award-winning fusion, jazz, and blues guitarist Scott Henderson. The credits for this wiring are given to John Suhr, but it’s unknown if he came up with this special wiring during his time as a senior master builder in the Fender Custom Shop, or later, after he started his own business in 1997.
Henderson is best known for his solo work but also for his band Tribal Tech, as well as for playing with Chick Corea and the Zawinul Syndicate. Henderson released his first solo album, Dog Party, in 1994 and has six solo albums to date. He’s also a teacher at the Guitar Institute of Technology, now known as the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, California. His signature S-style guitar is built by the Suhr company. Henderson and John Suhr got to know each other while Suhr was still working at the Fender Custom Shop, and Henderson became one of the first endorsers for Suhr Guitars.
Henderson wanted an exclusive tone control for the bridge pickup and full clarity in the two in-between pickup positions, so this wiring is exactly what he was looking for.
Henderson’s personal wiring is basically a standard Stratocaster wiring you all know:
- bridge pickup alone
- bridge and middle pickup together in parallel
- middle pickup alone
- middle and neck pickup together in parallel
- neck pickup alone
What makes this wiring special is that the two tone controls are freely assigned, and the tone control is bypassed in the two in-between positions. So, the switching matrix for the Henderson wiring goes like this:
- bridge pickup alone with tone control #1
- bridge and middle pickup together in parallel with no tone control
- middle pickup alone with tone control #2
- middle and neck pickup together in parallel with no tone control
- neck pickup alone with tone control #2
Henderson wanted an exclusive tone control for the bridge pickup and full clarity in the two in-between pickup positions, so this wiring is exactly what he was looking for. Another benefit is that the bypass of the tone controls for the in-between positions is slightly compensating for the little volume loss, which is the nature of the (passive) beast when you combine two pickups in parallel.
In a Strat with two tone controls, changing the standard 5-way pickup selector switch for a 5-way super-switch is mandatory because you can’t do all this with only two switching stages. We don’t need all four switching stages of the 5-way super-switch, so one stage will stay unconnected.
Technically, these are 4P5T wafer switches, and they’re available as open frame as well as PCB-based versions. These switches are physically a lot larger than the standard ones, so depending on what guitar you have, you can run into massive problems to make them fit without rerouting your electronic compartment. Always check this before you buy such a switch to avoid any unpleasant surprises. To make the open version from Fender fit, you need at least 21 mm of space for the switch, but it’s better to have 25 mm to avoid any problems with the soldering terminals.
So here it is, the Henderson wiring as seen in Fig. 1. This wiring uses three 250k pots, a 0.047 µF tone cap, and no treble-bleed network on the volume pot.
That’s it for now. Next month, we’ll continue the tone-pot-bypass journey by looking at a Telecaster wiring, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!