For today’s country guitarist, vintage-spec pickups bring the tone but don’t always make the cut in this era of higher gain. What is essential is something that brings heat and versatility without the lower output and noise.
Unleash the Sizzling Tones of the Hot Chicken Pickups
These pickups are made for fiery country tone without the vintage hum. "Spice up your sound and taste the difference with Seymour Duncan’s Hot Chicken pickups, designed to satisfy even the most discerning appetite for tone and performance."
For more information, please visit seymourduncan.com.
Seymour Duncan Hot Chicken Stacked Telecaster Bridge Pickup
When CHIC guitar wizard Nile Rodgers tells Chris Shiflett that he was at Woodstock, Shiflett quips, “You didn’t take the brown acid, did you?” Rodgers grins and chuckles, “I took every color acid they had!”
This is the tongue-in-cheek tenor of the latest episode of Shred With Shifty, a fun, often hilarious conversational romp through Rodgers’ music career. It all started with classical music and woodwinds (specifically the flute and clarinet), but as Rodgers tells it, a major turning point was a chance encounter with a crew of Los Angeles hippies—affectionately called “freaks” in those days of the late ’60s—that led to a two-day LSD party soundtracked by The Doors’ first album.
After he picked up a guitar at 16, he turned to unique jazz pluckers like Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery. He followed in their footsteps and played semi-hollow guitars until he met his longtime musical partner and CHIC cofounder, bassist Bernard Edwards, who urged him to pick up a Stratocaster. So it was then that the Hitmaker was born one fateful day in a south Florida guitar shop.
And Rodgers doesn’t shy away from the whole truth about the song’s history. Diana Ross was the first superstar that Rodgers had recorded with, but as he remembers, that didn’t stop him from spinning a little white lie to make sure that “I’m Coming Out” was released.
Credits
Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editors: Dan Destefano and Addison Sauvan
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.
Rig Rundown: Nile Rodgers [Chic]
Eric Johnson and “Virginia.”
This month, let’s take a deep dive into the details of Eric Johnson’s 1954 “Virginia” Stratocaster, and discuss how to install its unique wiring scheme in your Stratocaster.
For much of Johnson’s career, he’s played his 1954 Stratocaster, which he nicknamed after a masking-tape label found in the pickup routes. In the ’50s, it was common for employees at the Fender factory to sign the guitars they assembled. This now-iconic instrument was built by an employee named Virginia, one of the earliest women Leo Fender had hired to work at the Fender factory. (Virginia’s last name is a mystery from the early Fender days. There are several photos of her, and other early employees remember Virginia, but none seem to remember her last name.)
In 2020, Fender released the Eric Johnson “Virginia” Stratocaster, as well as a Custom Shop version. It’s unknown when the modifications were done to this guitar. Let’s look at some of the things that make “Virginia” unique, and how you’d recreate this by building your own personal copy:
Body: Two-piece, offset-seam sassafras body painted in the classic Fender two-tone sunburst finish. Sassafras, also called golden elm or cinnamon wood, is native to North America. It’s not a common tonewood, but Fender used sassafras for some early Strat bodies. My guess is that it was used to substitute ash and swamp ash. Sassafras has a grain and appearance similar to ash and chestnut, as well as a similar weight and density, and it was easy and cheap to get in large quantities.
There are different companies offering sassafras Strat bodies, but you can also choose an ash or swamp ash body. If you want to be as close as possible, get a two-piece body. Whether it’s offset-seam or not is up to you.
Neck: One-piece maple neck with a soft V-shape, 12"-radius fretboard sporting 21 jumbo frets and black dots. It should be no problem to find such a Stratocaster neck. And the choice of standard or figured maple is a matter of personal taste.
Hardware: Basically the standard Fender hardware from the ’50s, such as the typical Fender ’50s Stratocaster tremolo and Kluson vintage tuners. Here is a list of what is not standard on this guitar’s hardware:
- A single Graph Tech String Saver saddle is used on the high E string. All the other saddles are ’50s standard bent-steel saddles.
- A flat washer on the output jack.
- The tremolo uses four springs (instead of five), and the one that’s under the B string is not installed.
- A single ’60s-style butterfly string tree with a nylon spacer underneath, instead of the ’50s-style round string tree
The plastic parts: This is also ’50s standard, sporting a single-ply offset-white pickguard with aged-white pickup covers, knobs, switch tip, and tremolo arm tip.
EJ plays pure nickel strings, so this is also recommended if you want to get as close as possible.
Now, let’s have a close look at the electronics and wiring. Here is a list of the electronic parts you’ll need:
- DiMarzio DP116 HS-2 stacked humbucker bridge pickup
- Fender ’57 or ’62 EJ middle and neck pickups
- Standard open-blade 5-way pickup selector switch
- Cloth wire for all connections
- 375k audio volume pot with a 90/10 taper ratio, no treble-bleed network
- Two 250k audio tone pots with a 90/10 taper ratio
- 0.1 μF/150 V wax-paper tone capacitor
- Standard mono output jack
Getting all these parts should be no problem at all. The pickups are in production, 375k pots are available from various companies, and new wax-paper capacitors are also available. All three pickups should use latex tubing instead of springs for pickup-height adjustment.
If you wish to use NOS wax-paper caps, don’t worry about the voltage. It will have absolutely no influence on the tone inside the guitar, only on its size. Be sure its capacitance is close to 0.1 μF, because these caps have a tendency to drift in capacitance over time.
The switching matrix is almost standard Stratocaster and goes like this:
#1: bridge pickup
#2: bridge + middle pickup in parallel (in phase)
#3: middle pickup
#4: middle + neck pickup in parallel (out of phase)
#5: neck pickup
The DiMarzio stacked humbucker is permanently used as a split single-coil pickup with only the upper spool being engaged, so no humbucking feature is activated. The upper tone control is assigned to the neck pickup, while the lower tone control is connected to the bridge pickup, leaving the middle pickup without tone control. The pickguard uses ’50s-style copper-foil shielding (connected to ground), but only under the area where the electronics are installed, not over the whole pickguard.
If you want to put this wiring into your Strat, take notice of the out-of-phase feature in switching position #4. On the “Virginia” Strat, the bridge pickup has a south polarity, while the middle and neck pickups both have a north polarity, and the middle pickup is reverse-wound. Please note that this is not a reverse-wound, reverse-polarity (RWRP) pickup, because both pickups need to have the same magnetic polarity. There are many pickup combinations where this feature will not work, so upgrading your pickups may be necessary if you want the full package. In short, you need a middle and neck pickup with the same magnetic polarity, one of them reverse-wound, and both in phase with the bridge pickup.
So, here we go for the wiring (Fig. 1). As always, I tried to keep it as clean as possible by substituting the ground-wire runs with the international symbol for ground. I used the DiMarzio humbucker color code for the bridge pickup. If you decide to use a different brand, you need to transfer the color code of the wires with the correct color-code chart.
That’s it. Next month, we will dissect the new Fender John 5 “Ghost Telecaster” wiring, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!