Don’t forget to connect the ground wire! This attaches internally to the
bridge and strings.
With the vintage WR humbucker installed and wired up, it’s time to reassemble and test the Tele.
reissue pickup sounded great
with its vintage forebear, and
switched together they yielded a
beautiful, bold chime.
Rule of thumb: Do not mess
with the wiring of a vintage pickup. New pickups are fair game,
but the originals are sacred.
Fine-Tuning the Tone
Once we’d crossed that phase
hurdle, I was almost finished
with this crazy project. The last
part of any pickup-replacement
process is to adjust the height
of the pickups to balance their
individual output levels.
Normally, when I adjust the
height of the neck and bridge
pickups, I set the bridge pickup
a little closer to the strings than
its sibling. If you don’t do this,
the neck pickup can sound
much louder than the bridge.
However, because the vintage
’ 72 bridge unit is hotter than
the reissue neck pickup, I knew
I had to compensate for this.
The solution was to match the
height on both pickups—an
unusual but effective move.
