The Helicaster is born. Are you scared ?

my own guitar design project “17 Guitars” had it’s first official release created last week. 001BA was created. Ok, so this isn’t exactly a design revolution, but it is something special to me. Firstly it was a test model for a new truss rod design, the truss rod design worked great, but the hassle needed to make and install it wasn’t worth the effort it saved for adjustments. The second concept was a paint idea I wanted to work on. The idea came from wanting a telecaster with a mini-bucker pickup in the neck position. I’ve got tele’s and that fantastic telecaster twang is amazing, however I wanted a middle ground between a full on humbucker P90 style sound and a telecaster neck twang. Fender do a model with a mini-bucker in the bridge, however it’s not cheap and it’s very limited in options. It only comes in butterscotch, which I’ve got two teles in butterscotch already, and it only comes with a maple neck, and I wanted a rosewood neck. My option was a return to the Fender custom shop, or use it as a test bed for my truss rod design. I chose the latter. I put a Seymor Duncan mini-bucker in the bridge and had a rosewood neck made from a telecaster design but with my truss rod implementation in. The paint job was the idea that inspired the name helicaster. The idea was to have a dark wood body, which I chose a mid alder wood for, not as dark as I would have liked but I couldn’t go as dark as I wanted due to how hot the mini-bucker is.

The paint job was supposed to be a red base coat, with a black top coat and a nitrocellulose layer. The guitar was then supposed to be relic’d leaving the red as a fade to wood finish (Helicaster because of the black and blood red colours.) This didn’t quite work out as I couldn’t separate the black and red solid enough so the red has turned into an outline between the wood and the black finish. It looks cool, but not quite the look I originally planned. An added bonus is the red base coat has bled through into the wood body so has gentley stained and coloured the wood. When light shines on the guitar there is a red glow to the wood, while not effecting the actual obvious colour of the wood, it’s quite good. The guitar plays better than I could have imagined and %99 of the credit for this must go to my guitar tech Andy Manners at Vintage and Rare Guitars who is just first rate in terms of skill and first rate in knowing my personal setup. The sound is superb I can get a great hot sound from this telecaster, really fat and warm, %90 of a pure humbucker, but because I’ve use 250K pots on this, I can roll off the volume and take it back to a standard telecaster sound but with a little more bottom end, which is fanastic. The bridge pickup is a Bare Knuckles pickup called “The Boss” which again is a slightly warmer telecaster standard bridge pickup. I’ll take a moment to praise Tim from Bare Knuckles picksup who is just amazing at working with his customers, I first worked with Tim when he did a custom wound set of pickups for Fender Strat, called MD1. His attention to detail and knowledge to help you find the tone you’re after is second to none. Overall the Helicaster is a great sucess and plays fantastic and sounds superb, it has a few deviations and changes from the orginal design that where forced upon me, but this is all part of the learning process. Now, I’ve got to write a song with it to do it justice, I think I have one in the making already.