Fender 72′ RI Deluxe – rewire
This summer I ended up picking up a Fender 72′ RI Deluxe in walnut finish. It is a beautiful finish. It is pretty far removed from a standard Telecaster, but very cool none the less. I really like the 70’s strat headstock on these things. It comes with two wide range humbucker pickups. Right out the box this thing sounds ok. Looks far better than it sounds.
I found the neck pickup to be to muddy sounding. Just very inarticulate and mushy. Even when played through brighter sounding amps. Bridge was almost good. Actually had a warmer sound compared to most standard bridge pickups.
The guitar definitely has mojo in looks. It just needs some help in the tone department. The first big problem is fender uses 250k pots in all their guitars. While that is a fine value for single coils, it just doesn’t cut it for most humbucking guitars. So I ordered all new electronics. CTS 500k pots, orange drop caps, switchcraft switch, and some volume mods.
This whole rewire took a bit longer than I had hoped. After getting everything all together I had a bad ground loop. Fender did not have the bridge grounded at the factory. I had grounded that, but still it buzzed like crazy when not touching it. After going through the guitar several times I eneded up tracing the problem to the wires coming off the switch. It had the vintage cloth wire. Changed that out and all was good. I guess the wire was picking up too much interference.
Buttoned everything back up and fired up my Vox. Wow what a difference! Much more dimensional sound and the neck pickup is actually usable now. The guitar just came alive. The Volume mods work great. They are basically 220K resistor in parallel with a 471pf capacitor. They are soldered in parallel on the volume pot. It preserves the High frequencies and improves the taper when rolling back the volume. I tried it with them in and out. I will be adding this mod to all my guitars now. I highly recommend them and this mod to all the tele deluxe owners. This guitar has lots off sparkle and that high end kerrang.
