![Rig Rundown: Yvette Young [2023]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/rig-rundown-yvette-young-2023.jpg?id=34150999&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
The modern guitar hero dishes on her signature Ibanez YY10s, hints at their potential successors and tweaks, and reveals the ideal pedal that hasn’t landed on her board (yet).
Since we last saw Yvette Young in 2019, the guitar-playing musical illustrator has been challenged, and proven courageous.
“I went from a situation where I was afraid of one of my bandmates, and did what I needed to do to free myself from what I felt to be an emotionally, and thus creatively draining, situation,” Young revealed to PG earlier this year. She parted ways with Covet’s members during the recording sessions for the new album, Catharsis, and had the bass parts re-done by noted touring and session bassist Jon Button.
Through the writing and recording process she found personal purification. “I feel like, on Catharsis, some of the songs are a bit darker and it was definitely me having an outlet for some stuff that was painful, but a lot of it is uplifting and very happy and dance-y,” Young said. “Music is transformative. If you’re ever feeling in a bad mood, if you write music that sounds really happy, it can uplift you. Writing music that sounds like how you wish you felt can be really helpful sometimes.”
And while processing her feelings through the guitar, she became reinvigorated with the instrument and rediscovered its inherent joy.
“I really have to be my own fortress and I have to really stay in tune with what excites me,” admitted Young. “The direction I go in becomes really clear when I focus on what gives me goosebumps when I’m playing, what makes me jump up and down ’cause I’m so excited about it.”
Her charismatic, vivid guitar stories excite us, so we wanted to get the scoop on her ever-changing tools and palette. Weeks after releasing Catharsis, Yvette Young and her Covet bandmates headlined Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl. She invited PG’s Chris Kies onstage for a conversation covering her Ibanez YY10 signature models (and their potential upcoming changes), her dream pedal, and the key switches (and the alternative tones they produce) on her stomp station since the last Rundown.
Brought to you by the D’Addario Trigger Capo.
Signature Sparkle
During this headlining run, Young is traveling only with a pair of her signature Ibanez Prestige Series YY10 models with three Strat-style single-coil pickups. She has another Ibanez sig, the YY20, that is in a two-pickup, T-style configuration, but she notes in the Rundown that she prefers how the YY10 reacts with overdriven tones through her pedals and AC30. For Catharsis, she locked into F–A–C–G–C–E and wanted this set to feature fewer tuning moments and a more seamless musical narrative. Both touring YY10s have alder bodies with roasted maple necks, but “Creamsicle” has a rosewood fretboard and standard Seymour Duncan SSL52 Five-Two Strat pickups.
A fun fact from our 2023 PG interview with Yvette: These signature guitars are tuned (low to high) F–A–C–G–B–E when they are shipped. “I wanted to just kind of challenge people to try it,” she said. “I’ve been talking to a bunch of students and they’re like, ‘I never tried open tunings because I’ve always been scared of tuning it to something different.’ I was like, ‘Well what if it just came that way?’”
Green Machine
A roasted maple neck gives “Flubber” a different vibe, and its Wilkinson single-coils have sent Young down an experimental phase; she hints at P-90s potentially showing up in a future YY model. She says that the Wilkinsons are more “pristine and clear” in comparison to the Five-Twos that break up and get gritty in a pleasing way. This sparkly 6-string is reserved for tunings she drops down to D. Both guitars take D'Addario NYXLs (.011–.056).
Chime Time
Yvette has plugged into the same high input of the top boost channel of this Vox AC30 for years. Her settings reveal that she still uses the amp’s reverb even though there are two reverb pedals on her board, though Young does dial out all the amp’s trem.
Launchpad
Young has a lot of room to soar in an instrumental trio, so she travels with a plush pedal playground. Staples still being stomped on from the 2019 Rundown include a couple EarthQuaker Devices—The Warden and Avalanche Run—a MXR Carbon Copy Deluxe, an Electronic Audio Experiments Longsword, a Caroline Guitar Company Somersault, and a Meris Mercury7. For this tour, she’s welcomed some new noisemakers aboard, including a Universal Audio Galaxy ’74 Tape Echo & Reverb, a Hologram Electronics Microcosm, a Walrus Audio Julianna, a Beetronics Fatbee, a pair of Boss boxes—a DD-3 Digital Delay and OC-5 Octave—a double dose of DigiTech—Whammy Ricochet and FreqOut—a ZVEX Mastotron, and a Ground Control Audio Noodles. A D’Addario Chromatic Pedal Tuner keeps her YY10s in check.
Andy’s axe!
Best known as the guitarist from the Police, Summers was born and raised in England. He picked up the guitar at a young age, and moved to London when he was 19, aspiring to become a professional musician. Eventually, he played with some legendary bandleaders, including Eric Burdon and Jimi Hendrix. Summers studied classical guitar and composition in Los Angeles at California State University, Northridge, graduating in 1972. After moving back to London, he played with Joan Armatrading, Jon Lord, Mike Oldfield, and many more before meeting Gordon Sumner (aka Sting) and Stewart Copeland and joining the Police in 1977. The rest, as they say, is history.
The guitar Summers is most associated with—and which you can hear on a lot of the band’s hit records—is a well-worn and heavily modified sunburst Fender Telecaster. Let’s dive into what makes it so unique.
The story goes that before returning to the U.K. from Los Angeles, Summers bought this Telecaster from one of his guitar students for $200 (approximately $1,420 today). It was already highly modified, and Summers instantly fell in love with it. Modifications included a brass nut and brass bridge plate with six individual brass saddles. The bridge pickup was installed directly into the body and there is a humbucker in the neck position, plus it had a phase switch on the bridge pickup and an additional third pot and switch controlling its active boost circuitry. The only mod Summers did on the guitar after receiving it was installing replacement Schaller tuners.
Summers has stated that the guitar is from 1961, although, because of the double binding on the body, it’s quite possibly a sunburst Telecaster Custom from 1963. The serial number on the neck heel indicates 1961, suggesting Fender may have used pre-produced necks from an earlier batch for the first run of Telecaster Customs in 1963. Or maybe it was a custom order from someone who wanted double binding in 1961? Dennis Galuszka from the Fender Custom Shop was the lucky guy who had the pleasure of taking the original instrument apart to closely study it while collecting info for the Tribute series. In September 2024, he told Guitar World: “If I had to guess, it looks like the neck came off a ’50s Tele because it actually had a little white blonde paint—like they used on ’50s Teles—left on the butt. But the neck pocket had no date written or stamped on it, which was weird. And the body has been routed out so much under the pickguard that all traces of a date are long gone.” There are no records at the Fender factory that can shed any more light on this, so it will remain a mystery—but not the only one.
Putting a neck humbucker on a Telecaster was nothing too special at this time; same goes for the phase switch. But while brass hardware had become a popular mod to many guitars by the mid-to-late ’70s, it wasn’t something that was common on Telecasters (or on Fenders in general), making the brass nut and bridge plate unusual.
Another mystery is the active booster circuitry inside this guitar. When the Fender Custom Shop released the Masterbuilt Andy Summers Tribute Telecaster in the mid 2000s, it was equipped with the mid-boost circuit from the Eric Clapton Strat. This circuit first debuted in 1983 in the Fender Elite Stratocaster, 10 years after Summers received this Telecaster. So the circuit used in Summers’ Telecaster must have been a different one. Keeping the timeline in mind, it’s likely that it was one of the many treble-boost circuits from this era—maybe something like the Dallas Rangemaster, EHX LPB-1, or something similar with a single-pot boost control. Or maybe it came from a cannibalized stompbox or was a home-brewed device ... again, this will remain a mystery. My personal guess is that the original circuit in the guitar stopped working after 1983, and one of the guitar techs had to replace it. Maybe Summers was not interested in those details, and as long as there was a boost available, he didn’t care what was going on under the hood.
Belt-buckle rash? A bit.
Photo courtesy of Ten-Guitars (https://ten-guitars.de)
Another mystery is the identity of the student who he purchased the guitar from. Summers has never shared their name, and we don’t know who modded it. Interestingly, in all those years, no one ever spoke up to earn the credits for this modding work. This alone fuels speculation as to who really did all these mods.
Now, let’s take a look what features this guitar has:
• 2-piece alder body, white double binding, 3-tone sunburst finish
• Quarter-sawn maple neck, C profile, 21 vintage frets, 7 1/4" fretboard radius, brass nut
• Scale length 25 1/2", width at nut 1.650"
• Brass bridge plate with six individual brass saddles
• Schaller M6 tuning machines
• Two butterfly string trees
• Rectangular jack plate held by only two of four screws
• 3-ply mint green pickguard with ’59 PAF humbucker in the neck position and ’60s Telecaster single-coil pickup directly mounted into the body
• Standard Telecaster 3-way pickup selector switch with modern wiring: bridge/bridge + neck in parallel/neck
• 250k master audio volume, 250k master audio tone controls
• Mini-toggle phase switch for the bridge pickup on the control plate
• Extensive routing on the back housing the active boost circuitry, 9V battery, and the additional third pot for controlling the amount of boost, all covered with a homemade backplate out of 3-ply black pickguard material
In the next installment of this column, we will break it down piece by piece, talk about the wiring, and how you can build your own Andy Summers tribute Telecaster, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!
