New Deluxe Tele wiring scheme for Express

[Cliff Schecht]

I came up with this neat new wiring scheme for my Deluxe Tele that plays really well with the Express. The big thing here is that the stock neck and bridge pickups are stacked together on a dual concentric 250kA pot and the middle pickup (a SD Hot Rails in my case) is given its own 500kA pot so that everything gets loaded properly (as opposed to trying to mix singles and humbuckers on a 250k or 500k pot). The tone pot is a 500kB/.047uF cap setup and I especially like the pot I used because it has a middle "detent" that clicks into place at just the right amount of rolloff (IMO of course ). The other nice thing is that with the S-H-S setup, the three middle positions cancel hum if your middle humbucker can be setup to auto-split on a 5-way selector.

I played the Tele last night in the studio for a good 3 hours and really found this setup to be a lot slicker than trying to roll the volume knobs up and down constantly, especially when you have to cut to a solo and just have to flick the selector as opposed to trying to find the right level with the volumes. Instead, you set each volume as you need them for the whole song (I use neck clean, middle for solos and bridge as a mute or less distorted rhythm). Works great and with a bit of ingenuity it'll fit right into your original Tele (minus the extra hole drilled for the new tone pot).

Sorry for the bad diagram but imagine the two 250k pots being in the same body with concentric controls (i.e. two shafts in one pot body...eek that sounds dirty!). It makes working with the monstrous Express a bit simpler for us Tele fans, that's for sure!