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This is a brand new Fender® Blacktop Telecaster® that we've modified with some very nice upgrades, which are detailed below. All original parts are included in the sale. We're an authorized Fender dealer, and this guitar is sold with a full factory warranty. The guitar weighs 8.10 pounds. The Blacktop guitars ship from Fender with two Fender humbuckers. We've modified this guitar by installing a pair of Lindy Fralin P-92s. This pickup evolved from requests to Fralin that they build a P-90 pickup into a humbucker casing, for players who had humbucker guitars, but who wanted the P-90 tone. Fralin initially made these pickups by hand on an as-requested basis, but when they decided to make the pickup for production and buy the tooling to make the covers, they decided to make the pickup hum-canceling into the bargain. Normal P-90s have all of the hum that Strat and Tele single-coils are known for. When most pickup makers approach the dilemma of making pickups that sound like single coils - but without the hum - most elect to make pickups with full-length side-by-side or over-under coils. And while most achieve hum-canceling, they usually fall short of the more important goal, which is true single-coil tone. Fralin's approach to this problem is typically to use two short coils, where one coil is positioned under the wound strings and the other under the plain strings. Using this approach, they're able to get very close to the sound of the target pickup. So if you ever wanted a Tele with P-90s, but no hum, this is your chance. While we were replacing the pickups, we completely rewired the guitar with a 4-way switch. Fender ships the Blacktop guitars with cheap, low-quality components, so we rewired it with the good stuff: CTS, Oak-Grigsby, and Switchcraft. This necessitated replacement of the control plate, which was drilled for the metric shafts of the stock components. We used a genuine US Fender control plate for this, and the stock electronics will ship with the guitar still mounted to the original control plate. (The replacement control plate isn't shown in the prices at the end of the video, hence the $13.99 price disparity). The 4-way switch allows you to get the three traditional Tele combinations, but also allows you to combine the two pickups in series, in addition to parallel. You can hear the result in the video below. Position 4: neck pickup + bridge pickup (series)
Position 3: neck pickup
Position 2: neck pickup + bridge pickup (parallel)
Position 1: bridge pickup Finally, we've replaced the stock saddles with Callaham hardened saddles for better tone. This guitar is ready to go. Sounds great, plays great, is great! This guitar cannot ship internationally. Sorry! | | | | Video of actual guitar for sale | | | | | | Click images below for larger versions |  |  |  |  |  |  | | | |