This week I had a nice guitar here – a Gibson Chet Atkins CEC. The CE stands for classical electric, in other words a solid-body guitar with nylon strings and a piezo pickup, while the last C stands for conventional neck width (2″/5.1 cm  at the nut, a CE model with a neck width of 1.825″ / 4.6 cm was also available).

This guitar model was developed by Chet Atkins who approached Gibson with his prototype. The model appeared in Gibson’s catalogue in 1982, right at the time when Dire Straits recorded the Love over Gold album. This album features two songs – Private Investigations and the title track – on which a classical (=nylon-strung) guitar was used. Note that on the album it was NOT the Gibson Chet Atkins, however, Mark  Knopfler started to play it on stage for the Love over gold tour, right after recording the album. You can hear it e.g. on the Alchemy live album where it was used not only on Private Investigations and Love over Gold but also in the outro of Romeo&Juliet. Knopfler (probably) also used it on many sessions with other artists in the early 80ies,  e.g. with Phil Everly or Paul Brady.

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Specs

The body is not all solid mahagony but features sound chambers to reduce weight and to make the sound more acoustic. The top is solid spruce or cedar. The neck is mahagony with a neck joint location at the 12th fret – like a classical guitar. The scale is 25 1/2″, the fingerboard and the bridge are from ebony.

The pickup system consists of six individual piezos that are installed under the bridge. The pickup signal is preamplified in the control cavity (that consequently houses a 9V battery), a volume control and the (active) tone control is located on the rim of the guitar (later models have a bass and treble control). A really useful feature are six trim pots inside the control cavity that allow to adjust the volume for each string individually so that you can equalize volume differences easily.

The guitar here i a CEC with the wider nut, I suspect – it is not easy to see on pictures – that Mark Knopfler had the CE model with the more narrow neck. For me the wide neck is nothing I am used to, nevertheless the guitar is not really difficult to play.

Sound

The Gibson Chet Atkins produces a faithful classical guitar sound, and can be played even at high volume without the risk of feedback. Of course a ‘real’ classical guitar might produce the typical sound even better – for this reason Mark Knopfler probably replaced the Gibson with a Ramirez on the On Every Street tour in 1991/2.

One problem of many classical guitars – and also of the example shown here – is intonation. As the bridge does not have individually adjustable saddles like on an elctric guitar, and neither  a ‘compensated’ bridge design with different lenths for the different strings, the guitar never perfectly intonates all notes. If you tune the open strings, the bass note on e.g. the low e string is out of tune at the higher frets, and there is almost nothing you can do against it.

Here is a video I recorded with this guitar (if video jumps make sure slide show above is not running):

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For this week I had some nice borrowed guitars around which made me record a short youtube video comparing them with some of mine, all played over the same amp with the same setting – only the volume knob was adjusted for each. This was rather a spontaneous session recorded with the camcorder mic. I tried to play both some similar licks on different guitars and different licks that sound nice on the particular guitar.

The guitars were:

1 – Part-o-caster

This guitar is basically a copy of Mark’s Fender  which he used on that early Dire Straits stuff. It is not too accurate, wrong body wood, one-piece maple neck instead of laminated maple fingerboard etc. but it sounds nice in most situations. In the neck position it has a DiMarzio FS-1, in the middle position an old vintage Strat pick-up. One of the tone potis was replaced with a rotary switch that allows all kinds of pick-up combinations, even fat humbucker-like sounds.

2 – 1974 Gibson Les Paul Custom

70ies Gibson are surely not that much sough-after but this one is a nice guitar. It is tobacco sunburstwhich resembles a faded sunburst of those 50ies Paulas. Originally the plastic parts were black but they were replaced with white ones to look more like an ’58 Les Paul.

3 – 1983 Squier Stratocaster

These very first Squiers were really great, almost all of them sound cool. I put one of my loaded Schecter-style pickguards on it that allow a total of 27 sound combinations from the three tapped pick-ups.

4 – 2006 Suhr MK-1

This guitar looks and plays like a dream – and it sounds fantastic, too. The top is one of the fanciest I have ever seen, the wood looks almost three dimensional. Unfortunately it is here only for a couple of days, a guitar you can easily fall in love with.

5 – Fender Stratocaster

What to say about this one? The neck pick-up is not original (a FS-1), bare wood finish, needs to be refinished but it looks cool as it is, too.

6 – 68 Fender Telecaster

The late 60ies Telecasters are really cool, so is this one. The combination of the ash body with the maple cap neck  sounds really bright, but alwasy war at the same time. The neck pick-up is a Japanese copy, the owner still has the original pick-up that needs to be rewound.

7 – 77 Greco Super Sounds

Greco guitars are better known under tha Ibanez label. I think the domestic guitars were called Greco, the export guitars Ibanez. It sounds amazing – especially for its price! The gold anodized metal pickguard is not original.

Here you can vote for which one sounds best to you. You will see the results so far after voting.

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A guitar pickup does not contain any moving parts, and for this reason it is generally free of mechanical wear and might work for many decades (maybe even for centuries?). Nevertheless, certain pickup models seem to be prone to die earlier than others. One example are Fender pickups from the 50ies or early 60ies. For this reason you will often see vintage Stratocasters with rewound pickups. The same is true for the Schecter F500T – a tapped pickup which consists of two individual coils.

It is mostly corrosion of the magnets that kills the pickup

The reason is simple. A pickup consists of some magnets and a coil – in case of a standard Fender-type singlecoil pickup we have individual magnetic pole pieces for each string, but some pickups also have non-magnetic metal pieces (or screws) that are connected to one bar magnet that often sits below the bobbin. The coil consist of hair-thin wire that is wound around the magnets. The wire is an extremely thin copper wire that is insulated with some film (e.g. laquer, formvar or enamel). For this reason – the wire itself is insulated – it is not necessary to insulate the magnets from the wire.

Now the problem: the magnets are made of metal – normally alnico which is an alloy of ALuminium, NIckle, and Cobalt – , and metal can corrode when exposed to humidity or other environmental factors like sweat, beer, or whatever. It is this corrosion of the magnets in the interior of the pick-up that can destroy the wire of the coil.
There are two different things that can happen: (a) the wire breaks and the pick-up will not produce any output at all anymore, or (b) only the insulation is destroyed and the coil is shortened. The pick-up will still produce some output but not as much as it normally does. It depends on the number of turns that are shortened how much output the pick-up will produce – any value from 0 – 100% is possible.

Fender reacted to the problem which killed so many pickups from the 50ies and applied a thin coat of laquer on the pole pieces before winding the coil. Alternatively some manufacturers  put some tape around the pole pieces.

Measurung the resistance of the pickup

The exact diagnosis of a defective pickup is simple. All you need is to measure the resistance of the coil with a multi meter (or to be concrete an ohm meter). Make sure that the pick-up is NOT switched on at the 5-way (or whatever) pick-up switch, but switched OFF. Then measure between the two poles where the cables are soldered to the pick-up. If you don’t want to open the guitar, you can also turn up the volume and tone controls, switch on the pick-up and measure at the output jack (plug in a guitar cable and measure between the two poles of the other plug). However, this measurment is not as exact as the other method since the potis will be in parallel to the pickup and reduce the resistance you will measure)

If the wire is broken, the multimeter will read an extremely high value (indefinite), if it is shortened it will read lower than the normal resistance of the pick-up (which is about 6 kohms in case of a vintage-style Stratocaster pick-up)

If the pickup is defective, there is nothing you can do to repair it except exchange it or let it be rewound by a specialist. If the correct type of wire is used, there should be no audible sound difference after the job.

If you are looking for a replacement for the Schecter F500T pickup, you should check out our tapped pick-ups by the German pick-up specialist Harry Haeussel. Click on the image below for more info.

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• MK-Guitar.com presents: Loaded Schecter F400-style pickguard
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• First demo of the VFS-1 pickguard
• The VFS-1 – New pick-up for our Schecter-style pickguards

I am proud to announce a brand new product which will be available exclusively on this site in the very near future.

For a long time those vintage Schecter pickguards, loaded with the sought-after F500T tapped Schecter pick-ups, have been the ultimate tool to convert your guitar into something similar to the legendary Schecter Dream Machines, or as a start point to build a high-end custom Strat. With those three mini switches and the tapped pick-ups you can select from not less than 27 pick-up combinations, ranging from the classic Strat sounds to fat p90-like blues sounds.

The loaded Schecter F400 pickguards came with the Dream Machines, or were available separately to upgrade your Strat in the 70ies and early 80ies. Anyway, they are extremely rare and for this reason almost impossible to get. No wonder that used items have sold for up to 1,500 USD on ebay since then.

Here they are again – exclusively on MK-Guitar.com

I had the idea to build one of these for myself but I soon found out that the price will be astronomical for two reasons: most of those fancy parts like for example the American flat-lever mini switches or the conductive plastic potis are hard to get, and if so only in certain quantities. Also, some jobs like constructing the pickguard in AutoCAD to get a vector file that controls certain high-tech machinery imply an enormous amount of work and time, and would not pay for just one single board. So the idea of a small production run was born.

Highest quality only

The core idea of Schecter was to offer upgrade parts for your guitar, and as an upgrade these need to be of superior quality. Mind that a complete Schecter Dream Machine was never considered as as Strat copy because even back then it cost a multiple of the price for a US Fender Strat. Everything was made with finest parts. The potis for example were not simply some potis, they were US made conductive plastic potis for extended life, fully dust capsuled. When you turn them, they do not feel like a crappy Chinese poti found in many guitars these days. Instead, they have that creamy tight feel you associate with the volume knob of an expensive  HIFI amplifier. We have them again!
Or those mini switches: they are still available today but normally they have a round lever instead of the flat one. I indeed found Asian switches with flat levers that look alright but if you compare them with the real stuff, they simply feel different, they rattle, and – call me a snob – when you switch them, the “click” sound is different than with the US switches. Finally I managed to get hold of US made switches, they cost me three times as much as the Asia stuff but it is worth the price. I even got those  fancy round dress nuts for the switches, essential for the authentic look.

Hand-wound finest custom pick-ups by Harry Häussel

Another problem were the pick-ups. The original Schecter F500T was a tapped pick-up for both the classic Strat sound and a fat, warmer lead sound. The ones you see on ebay are extremely expensive, or often defective. It seems many of them have problems after some decades, something which is also true for 50ies Fender pick-ups. A few companies, e.g. Seymour Duncan, still make pick-ups that are somewhat similar to the F500T. However, similar was not enough for me, so I teamed up with one of Europe’s hottest pick-up winding gurus – Harry Häussel – to come up with something superior. Those of you who know Harry’s outstanding vintage Fender replicas will not be surprised to hear that our pick-ups are made with real love and attention to even smallest details. They have the same kind of magnets, the same winding wire, the same winding method. I even got American gauge cables of the same colours – black, yellow, and purple -  simply because the European cable gauges looked too skinny, or were too fat.

What you get

Our loaded pickguards should fit on all Strat-sized guitars (8 holes like vintage Schecter).

* Made of solid brass (alternatively white aluminium), professionally high-tech cut to our specifications in Germany, professionally polished for that magic, shiny look.

* Hand-wound pick-ups for that F500T sound. Magnets, wires, winding etc.,  like vintage Schecter. These are definitely not the cheapest but the best!

* Two US high-quality square potis, conductive plastic, extended life, just like vintage Schecter (in fact by one of the two suppliers that Schecter had, the other one  is out of business)

* Three US-made flat-lever mini toggle switches, with dress nuts, just like vintage Schecter

* Tone capacitor and treble bleeding capacitor with resistor, like vintage Schecter.

Price:  to be announced soon (Update: 419,- €)

Availabilty: coming soon (Update: first pickguards shipping)

See product in our shop:

 

Related articles

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• Demoing pickup combinations of the Schecter style pickguards
• Limited Alchemy Edition of the white Schecter pickguard
• Why do certain pickups like Stratocaster pick-ups from the 50ies or the Schecter F500T die so often?
• White Aluminium Schecter-style pickguards now available

In the 80ies, Mark Knopfler was probably the most famous user of Schecter guitars. He bought several Schecters in 1980 at Rudy’s Music Stop in New York, mainly because he was looking for a guitar that was easier to play and better suited for the high demands on the road than the vintage Fenders he played before. Also his former girl-friend played a Schecter which he said was much better than his Fender guitars.

So what was the story behind the Schecter company?

Schecter Guitar Research started around 1976 in Van Nuys, California, when David Schecter opened his repair and custom guitar shop. He soon started to produce his own quality guitar parts which were intended to replace some stock parts on common guitars. Especially the Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster were the ideal guitar to be hot-rodded, since all their parts could be replaced much easier than with the laminated constructions that Gibson used, and the quality of Fender guitars was possibly at the lowest in the Fender history.

Because of their background as supplier of upgrade parts, Schecter soon was mainly known for

(a) exotic woods

Unlike Fender who build their guitars from rather common woods (ash, elder, maple,..), Schecter specialized in beautiful exotic woods, like Shedua, Koa, Cocobola, Pau Fero, Mahagony, Rosewood, Purple Heart, or figured maple (necks), or Red Oak, Paduak, Zebrawood, Teak, Koa, Anjico, Imbuya, and many more (bodies). As you see, trading with protected tropical woods was not an issue in the 70ies yet.

All necks were one-piece which means they did not have a separate fingerboard (as Mark Knopfler’s red Tele had, but this was a very late model). They had 21 frets, 22 frets were a later trend started by heavy metal guitarists in the 80ies. If you upgraded your guitar with such a beautiful exotic wood, you don’t want to hide it behind a solid finish, consequently the typical Schecter guitar was bare wood, or an oil finish, although laquer was offered for additional charge.

(b) brass hardware

In the seventies it was common believe that a guitar should ideally be rather heavy in order to have a lot of sustain. Surprisingly today many players prefer light-weighted woods, and talk rather about tone than sustain. One way to improve sustain – which means how long a note will last – was to replace the steel hardware with brass hardware. For this reason not only Schecter but also Mighty Mite – the second big parts supplier – and Fender themselves offered brass hardware as an upgrade in the late 70ies. Fender even released an upgraded Stratocaster with the model name The Strat in 1980 that came with a brass bridge, a brass nut, and matching brass knobs. By the way, Schecter also supplied the big manufactureres like Fender and Gibson with parts, so possibly some of the brass master series parts by Fender were actually produced by Schecter.

(c) beefed-up pick-ups

In the 70ies, there were hardly any high-gain amps, again something that was more a child of the 80ies. Nevertheless, the first amp manufacturers or amp repair specialists were successful with offering high-gain mods, e.g. the first Mesa Boogies based on a Fender circuit that was modified to have more distortion. Another way to increase the distortion abilities was to replace the stock Fender pick-ups with overwound pick-ups. This was what DiMarzio started in the early 70ies. Instead of the common 7,000-8,000 windings you simply put much more on a Stratocaster pick-up. This way the pick-up became louder and had less treble but more mids. The drawback: you would loose the original Strat sound which was great for clear sounds. Here David Schecter came in with the invention of the F500T pick-up, the first successful tapped pick-up. Tapped means that the F500T was a beefed-up pick-up with almost twice as much windings than a standard Fender pick-up, but it had a tap after the normal number of windings, so you could “switch off” the second half of the coil so to say. For this reason the pick-up did not have the normal two cables but three (ground, half coil, full coil). The pick-up coils were switched by three mini switches with three positions each (tapped, off, full), instead of the Fender 5-way switch.

The Dream Machines

After a few years Schecter was very successful and their product range had grown so that they actually had each part of a Fender guitar in their catalogue. So it was nothing but the next logical step to offer complete guitars. These were put together by one of their qualified retailers (e.g. Rudy’s Music Stop was one of them), and marketed as Dream Machines. The five Strats (red, red, blue, sunburst, plus replacement sunburst) and the black Tele were Dream Machines. The red Tele as well, but he got this about 3 or 4 years later.

Some more detail difference between a dream machine and a stock Fender (except the points mentioned above): two strap pins at the bottom (Schecters were often heavy, and this way the player could change the balance by using one or the other pin), metal pickguards, only two knobs (one volume, one tone), treble-bleed capacitor to reduce treble loss when reducing volume (similar to the telecaster circuit), two long-life plastic conductor potis, and sometimes no fingeboard dots.

The end of the era

About 1983 Schecter was sold to – officially – a group of Texan investors, who moved over the business to Dallas, Texas. They still offered parts and complete guitars, but the quality was apparently different to what it was before. Here is an inofficial insider story I read in a forum:

One of the laeding sales guys at Schecter had origins in the ‘meat-packing industry’ – some weird people who made obscure deals. Before being accused of spreading false rumour, I prefer to quote the following:

“They basically write contracts to people that wanna save money on their meat purchases, by buying 1/2 a cow, and getting the cut and packed into convenient sizes. Don’t have a freezer big enough? They’ll sell you a freezer too, just sign the contract. Then they sell the contract to a finance company. If they get too many complaints, they simply move their operation to another county or another state.

Apparently, Shel didn’t use their investment money very wisely, and the meat-packers were getting pissed. I don’t know whether it was before, during, or after this problem, but at some point, Dave [Schecter] decided he had enough and split (or was forced out; that part is still unclear to me), leaving the company in Shel’s hands. At some point the meat-packing investors decided that they had had enough, too.

One night. around midnight, they showed up in meat delivery trucks at Schecter after the place had closed, broke the locks, went in, and grabbed everything they could grab: guitars, pickups, winding machines, office furniture, everything that wasn’t bolted down (and a few things that were), loaded their trucks and split – for Dallas, Texas.”

So according to this source, the whole Schecter Californian shop was robbed out and the inventory sold from Dallas. This would explain why the Dallas era guitars still have many identical parts while other parts seem to be from other sources, and the overall quality was lacking.

Later the name Schecter was sold to a Japanese investor who moved back the company to California. The new Schecter company made many original models,aiming mainly at the heavy metal scene. It seems besides the name this company has nothing to do with the original Schecter company.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• MK-Guitar.com presents: Loaded Schecter F400-style pickguard
• Loaded pickguards now available in black
• First demo of the VFS-1 pickguard
• The VFS-1 – New pick-up for our Schecter-style pickguards
• Demoing pickup combinations of the Schecter style pickguards
• Limited Alchemy Edition of the white Schecter pickguard

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