My Esquire Project

My custom built Esquire that started out as a Fender Japan 50’s Telecaster

Just after Christmas 2022, I bought a Fender Brad Paisley Esquire. It sounded great but it wasn’t really an Esquire and it was a lot of money for a made in Mexico product. Let’s be perfectly honest, it’s a good Mexico made Telecaster with some aging applied and a Seymour Duncan Secret Agent pickup hidden under a very pretty black paisley scratch plate. Those who read the review, know that while I thought it was a good guitar, it had no magic for me, and was more expensive than I thought it was worth so I returned it.

I started looking for other alternatives. The Fender website listed a Squier Classic Vibe Esquire, but when I checked with the dealer network I was advised that it had been discontinued over a year ago. Fender’s website sucks and blows on its better days, so while disappointed I was not surprised.

Later that week I took my Fender Japan 50’s Telecaster off its hook. Many folks other than I also agree that the Made in Japan Fenders are excellent. I have a couple. This one and my Rosewood Telecaster from decades ago were both made in Japan.

So I got to thinking. What if I were to turn the MIJ 50’s Tele into an Esquire? The neck was perfect being a nice V neck profile with a naturally aging maple board, but not destroyed with wear and dirt. The stock pickups were marked as 52 series, in keeping with the model and sound like an old Telecaster. I could always just remove the neck pickup and then rewire the controls like an Esquire.

So I went online to find an Esquire pickguard. I had liked the paisley black pickguard on the Brad Paisley but could not find one. Maybe Fender sells one, but no one could find one on Fender’s lousy site. I did find a custom maker in the United States, but I didn’t want to wait a month or so and pay about $50 USD for a pickguard. I considered a generic one in parchment like the one already on the Telecaster but without the opening for the neck pickup, but ended up ordering a very nice looking fake tortoiseshell one from Musiclily. It was inexpensive and while the fit was not optimal, it worked in the end.

The tuners are the older strip style Fender ones. Not locking but fast string change capable. So I squirted some PFTE lubricant into each one, and spun it for a while with a drill and a tuning peg adapter and they move smoothly, have no hiccups and no lash. And they look like the tuners on an Esquire.

About this time I started thinking about pickups. I really did like the sound of the Seymour Duncan Secret Agent pickup in the Fender Brad Paisley Esquire. I checked around in Canada and no one had any. No surprise there. I checked Sweetwater and they did not have one either, but they have a service where they will notify you when something is available that you have marked. So I clicked the box and moved on. On the Seymour Duncan site, I found the pickup and after some faffing about I was able to buy one. The website did say that each order is made on demand and that there can be a short delay. A couple of days later I received the confirmation of my order with no delivery date, so I sent an email off. The folks were super responsive and said it would be about eight weeks. Yikes! But what choice did I have.

That very evening, I got an email from Sweetwater that they had just received five of the Secret Agent pickups. I went online and bought one immediately, and then sent a polite email off to Seymour Duncan to ask them to cancel my order because I had been able to get the pickup from their dealer Sweetwater. The same person at Seymour Duncan got back to me the next day and had put the cancellation through and as promised, the purchase was refunded to my credit card in about four days. While Seymour Duncan did have a fairly long delivery. their customer service was superb.

Ok. Neck pickup ordered. Hmm, do I stay with the factory bridge pickup or try something else? After surfing around a bit, I discovered that Seymour Duncan also made a bridge pickup for Brad Paisley called the La Brea. I looked into it not because I am a huge Brad Paisley fan (I’m not, I respect his work and talent, but I am more a bluesy rock person than a country person) but because I have read about what a tone oriented gentleman he is, and I thought what the heck, why not match the bridge pickup to a pickup in the neck that was also designed for him. So I went online and found one through Amazon Canada and it arrived shortly. Actually the day after the Sweetwater order arrived.

When I ordered the La Brea, I also ordered a set of Wilkinson compensated brass saddles. Telecaster owners know that intonation on the regular barrel saddles can be challenging and these had good reviews, and would not require replacing the Fender bridge plate with one with six holes if I went with individual saddles.

While gathering kit together, I also ordered a roll of copper tape to line the cavities of the guitar. The guitar did not have copper foil inside the pickup or control cavities and I find single coils to be a bit noisy and susceptible to external electrical noise. I knew I was wandering pretty far afield from a true Esquire but it’s my guitar and I am ok with that.

So today, the same day I am writing this, I unrolled a service mat on the kitchen table and set to work. I removed the existing strings and unscrewed the existing pickguard and control cover. I then removed the bridge plate.

I used a fingerboard protector and went over each fret with 0000 steel wool many times to polish them up. Then I used some diluted Murphy’s Oil Soap to clean the fingerboard. It’s not recommended to use fretboard cleaner or fretboard treatment on maple boards. The fluids can enter the maple where the frets are cut in and cause some rippling in the surface. I had a little bit of that on the higher frets, but I did not let the Murphy’s soak in. It was light spray on, scrub and wipe off. This left the fretboard clean and smooth. I am a big fan of Monty’s Fretboard Wax, so I then used it on the fretboard, applying it and then buffing it off. Maple boards are sealed on top but there is no issue waxing the surface. The Monty’s product buffs off with no residue and leaves the wood protected and more frictionless than just the oil soap.

I then used water on a soft cloth to clean all the recesses in the body and then dried them out. This led to the most time consuming and challenging work off the day, applying the copper foil tape inside the body cavities. The tape cuts with scissors and when you peel the backing off is quite sticky. It’s also very thin so it bends readily but also tears readily. I have short sausage fingers and take an XL glove, so long and spider like my fingers are not. I got all the cavities copper lined but I will never tell anyone that the work is beautiful because it is not. It does what I want and that’s as good as it gets.

The Secret Agent pickup goes into the cavity with a firm sponge adhered to the base. When placed properly it sits just proud of the top of the body so when the pickguard is screwed on, it presses down on the pickup making a solid contact between the pickup and the bottom of the pickguard. The magnets in the Secret Agent are ceramic. While the mounting mechanism may sound odd, let me assure you that it works a charm. My only issue with the pickup is that the leads are not cloth coated and are in my opinion just long enough, without much slack.

Installing the bridge pickup was easy. Remove the old one, and use the same screws and compressible spacers to mount the new one. The wires from this pickup were nice and long, and cloth covered. However, the documentation says that they are white and black. They are actually yellow and blue. I was able to figure out which was positive and which was negative.

Before getting to the desoldering of the old and the soldering of the new, I took the time to change the bridge saddles. The new saddles are really solid but there was no indication of which saddle was for which string pair. I ended up looking at a number of stills on Google images, zooming in on brass compensated saddles to figure out which one was for which pair of strings. This took more time than it should have. The new saddle springs have much more tension than the original ones, so it took some finger gymnastics to get the saddles on the new screws while holding back the springs. I set the length protruding from the saddle to be about ¼ inch, knowing that I had an intonation job ahead of me.

While the strings were off, I checked the neck for straightness because this is a recreation of a fifties Fender so the neck has to come off or the pickguard does to adjust the neck. I had had no issues before and I was going to use the same gauge strings, expected no issues, and thankfully in this regard, I was proven correct.

It was time to solder. The good news about the pickup arrangement that I had chosen is that I soldered the new pickups in exactly the same way as the ones that I removed. I discovered while removing the old pickups that the solder job on the base of the volume pot for the negative leads was disgusting. I remembered that the original bridge pickup failed in the first year and it was replaced under warranty by the seller. Unfortunately the solder work was quite messy and whatever solder had been used was not optimal. Enter the desoldering vacuum unit. Once I had cleaned out the old solder as best I could, I tinned the wires from the pickups and soldered them in place. Then I waited for them to cool and tugged on them and sure enough, I had two cold solder joints of four because I had the temperature of my new solder station set too low. Cranking the temperature and redoing the joints gave me the results that I wanted and needed.

Before mounting the pickguard, I connected a small battery powered amp to the output of the guitar and tapped each pickup to ensure it was live when it should be and silent when it was not engaged. All good there. I screwed in the controls plate and then mounted the pickguard, and had to remember that because of the foam block under the neck pickup that I would have to press down on the pickguard to make the mounting holes line up. All done and with the protective film removed, the tortoiseshell pickguard looked pretty cool against the black gloss finish of the body.

Time to restring. While I have made a general change to Curt Mangan Coated 9.5 - 44 strings, I used a set of D’Addario NYXL 10-46s that I had in my string inventory. These are the same gauge that came off the guitar, and I don’t mind 10s on Fender scale length necks.

Once the strings were on, stretched, tuned, stretched and tuned, I took a break to have a bite. I then came back and adjusted the saddle height using my handy Stewmac gauge and then worked to get the intonation right. Even with the compensated saddles, it’s never perfect, but certainly better than I ever got with the uncompensated saddles. While I really like the look of the brass saddles against the newly polished bridge plate (when things are apart, that’s when to clean and polish everything), I am one of those weirdos who actually LIKE having the giant ashtray cover on a Telecaster type bridge plate. I even order Stratocaster bridge covers because I like the appearance and prefer the feel on the side of my hand instead of little grub screws digging holes in my flesh. I know that these bridge covers are considered unfashionable, but I don’t care, and I personally cannot hear any difference in a Tele style bridge pickup with the ashtray on or off. My opinion is that that argument is an urban myth without data to support it.

The guitar is ready to go. A quick application of polish to the body and a hard rub into the back of the neck so it never gets sticky and I’m ready to plug in. I have checked that the pickup are connected so I’m not nervous about function, and hopeful that the sound is pleasing.

For my first play session, I used my Fender Tonemaster Blonde Deluxe Reverb. I have done a review on that amplifier here, so I won’t go into detail on it except to remind everyone that it sounds awesome.

And…

I’m really very impressed! I needed to raise the bridge pickup a bit overall, as I did not make any fine adjustments after restringing. I try for about 1/8th of an inch spacing between the top of the poles and the strings when they are depressed at the 21st fret. For me, I get good tone and do not get excessive magnet pull. The La Brea is not wound hot, coming in around 7.26 k. The Secret Agent is nearly 11.5k which sounds crazy hot until you remember that it is buried underneath a three ply pickguard. Pickup balance is good, although I will go back and lower the bridge pickup a bit to improve the volume balance between the bridge and the neck. The La Brea in the bridge is really nice. With the tone all the way up it is bright without any ice pick in the earhole nonsense. With the tone rolled all the way off, it gets muddy, but that is the fault of the tone pot. I’ve made a note to myself to get a pair of higher quality audio taper pots for the guitar.

The Secret Agent in the neck is spectacular! With the tone rolled off to about 4, you get this really warm jazz box like vibe and of course, the pickup is not seen at all. With the tone all the way up, the sound is rich and nicely warm without being the least bit woofy. Together they are a beautiful blend.

I have since played the guitar through a handwired AC30, my Tone King Imperial Mark II and the recently purchased Laney head that I have written about. Different sounds from the different amps as expected and desired and all extremely pleasing. It is unique and does not sound like any of my other Telecasters, which is perfect.

So that’s my Esquire project. It’s not really an Esquire. It has two pickups. It is wired like a 50s Telecaster, not like an Esquire. The headstock decal says Telecaster. It’s more like a Fender Brad Paisley Esquire, which is also not really an Esquire. The pickups are fabulous and that neck is that perfect early 50s V. If you don’t read the headstock it looks like an Esquire although to my knowledge Fender never made an Esquire in black with a tortoiseshell pickguard. However, my goal was not to make another fake vintage looking guitar, but to take a great guitar and make it special and unique for me. In this, I count myself as successful because it is everything I hoped for and none of the things that I feared.

Thank you as always for reading and until next time, peace.