Description

Hoagland Custom, located in sunny Fernandina Beach, Florida, has specialized in custom guitar wiring and pickup making for over 25 years…

& we love what we do!

Could this be Keith Richard’s “Micawber”? Some think so…

The 1950 Broadcasters and (later) Telecasters had a few differences between them:  different shaped necks, slight differences in the bodies, the pickups were different (the bridge was slightly hotter than conventional Teles and the neck was underwound quite a bit for more clarity and less muddiness), and the wiring was different.

“Ultimate Guitar Magazine” published a really good article on Keith Richard’s “Micawber” Tele wiring. You can read that here: Keith Richard’s “Micawber” article

From the Ultimate Guitar Magazine” article: “During the recording process, the Tele was completely stock (or at least it wasn’t altered from when Clapton owned it) but after the tour in 1972, Keith’s tech at the time, Ted Newman Jones III, replaced the neck pickup with a 50’s Gibson PAF humbucker and the bridge pickup with a pickup out of a Fender lap steel which he chose because it was as close as he could find to the pickups used in a Broadcaster [it was from a ‘40s-era Champion].

“With the (two-pickup) Esquire/Broadcaster Blend wiring scheme, you’re adding tone from a neck pickup (humbucker) to the tone from a bridge pickup (single coil) with what would traditionally be the tone pot. You’ll notice a resistor and a capacitor on the schematic as well – you can dial in your tone between brighter and darker by swapping out these two little parts. The darkness of the neck pickup in position 3 will be (to some extent) determined by the value of the capacitor linking the volume pot to the selector. The resistor will dictate the volume drop when switching from 2 to 1. This is more of an issue when using two pickups with drastically different outputs. You can take the resistor out altogether and use a jumper wire instead too. You can use non-linear pots as well. There is an incredible amount of tone tweaking you can do with this setup.”

“Micawber”, named after a character in a Charles Dicken’s novel, has a neck pickup that metered at 7.8k and his bridge metered at 10k.

This Broadcaster with a “No Load” tone pot wiring harness allows you to combine the neck humbucker pickup with the bridge single coil pickup by blending in just as much (or as little) neck pickup as you like.

HARDWARE:   (included are dress washers/nuts & switch mounting screws)

• silver nuts, washers, & switch mounting screws
• Optional – “Pure Tone” premium mono output jack

CAPACITOR:

• Sprague “Orange Drop” poly capacitor, .015mfd value

SWITCHING POSITIONS:

• P1 – Bridge single coil pickup w/blend to allow neck pickup to be added
• P2 – Neck humbucker pickup alone – blender does nothing
• P3 – Neck humbucker pickup w/.015mfd capacitor (very warm tone, blender does nothing)

STANDARD INCLUDES:

• CTS or Bourns Pro Series volume control, 250k value, audio taper
• CTS “No Load” tone control, 250k value, linear taper
• Sprague “Orange Drop” poly capacitor, .015mfd value
• 15k resistor, 1/2watt
• 3-way lever style switch
• Switchcraft mono output jack
• Gavitt vintage style, cloth covered wire
• easy-to-follow wiring diagram
• tech support phone & email