I Need To Talk About My DGT.

While I do love my DGT guitars (among others) immensely I am somehow always magically drawn to my Stratocasters. I totally get what you’re saying.

I'm a tele guy. I'd love a tele that sounded just like my DGT (bridge pickup). I love LOOKING at my DGT, it's gorgeous. But it's neck isn't as comfy, and the guitar isn't as comfy/stable in my lap as my teles. Standing up live, I have also found I don't play the DGT quite as well as my teles... I'm sure it's just about the comfort level I have reached with my teles... same body shape, they all have very similar neck profiles, they all feel the same when playing them...

A tele with a DGT bridge pickup and a single-coil/noiseless neck pickup would be the bomb. That's why the NF53 is interesting to me... but it'll still have a PRS, not Fender, neck profile. I've never seen one out in the wild to try.
 
Before you do anything as drastic as swapping out a pickup, you really should give the de-mud mod I mentioned above a try. Dirt cheap, and easy to do (and to reverse).

This is the neck tone I wanted when I did it (note it's clean; I am not and have never been a fan of neck Humbuckers under gain; I LOVE single coil neck pickups under gain). It's clear, not too bass heavy, but still rich-sounding.

If the issue is setting your amp for a bridge tone you love, then the neck is too muddy at those settings, this is a problem I have lived with my entire life... especially with neck humbuckers. The de-mud mod won't fix that. I'm going through the same thing now with my EBMM Luke III. But the de-mud mod will make for a beautiful sounding neck PAF, in and of itself.

As for humbuckers that are single-coil sounding, you've got:
Dimarzio EJ Custom
Dimarzio Humbucker From Hell
Fralin Twang Master
Fralin Big Single
...I'm sure there are some from smaller winders out there as well.

I've never played a Jazz, it does seem to solve the issue for some people, I don't think it has any less bass, it just has alot more treble. IMHO too much bass is the problem, more treble doesn't fix it.
If you connect in series a .047 cap to the hot wire of your neck pickup before the pot it will lower the bass response quite nicely
 
Throw out the perfect suit because the tie doesn’t match.
We see it very differently.:p:D
Hopefully The String Action From The Factory Is Exactly How Grissom Likes His And Of Course Your Preference Is Exactly Like Grissom's Preference. It Would Be A Shame To Adjust Anything To Make It Work For You. This Mindset Sounds Like A Polite Spin On Jail. Who The Heck Wants To Live There?
 
If it's yours, my bet is it's awfully nice.
That is kind of you. I wasn’t really planning on having something built while in the vault that day. I just stopped in to say hi. But there was a great big chunk of Koa that I couldn’t resist drawing on. The top, fingerboard and headstock all came from the one piece of wood.
The dealer decided to build it as a drew it, whether I wanted the guitar or not. On the way home, Mrs got sad about someone else owning our design so we called back and took it.
Hit Me Up When You Decide.
Not, sure my memory is that good, but I’ll try. I know which ones are leaving in 2025 and then will see how the mix of what is left feels.
 
A tele with a DGT bridge pickup and a single-coil/noiseless neck pickup would be the bomb. That's why the NF53 is interesting to me... but it'll still have a PRS, not Fender, neck profile. I've never seen one out in the wild to try.
I think the NF53 would be worth trying out, as the neck carve is narrower than the DGT.

I'm not a Tele or Fender player. But I needed a Tele for a project, and the creative team wanted a traditional single coil Tele sound.

The project was a good one, and I didn't feel comfortable saying, "I'm going to come close and that'll be good enough," especially since the main client wanted to come for one or two sessions.

Problem is, my studio is very noisy and buzzy with most single coil pickups; the city installed some sort of radio water meter device (there was no choice) and my recording room is right near it. I needed the trad. single coil sound with noise-canceling pickups. So here's an alternative that may or may not be worth looking at; I should point out that again, I'm not a Tele guy, I prefer a PRS. So take this for what it's worth (maybe not much!).

Having had good luck with a couple of Tom Andersons (one was a Tele) in the late '90s, I decided to get one of Tom's Teles with their noise-canceling pickups. I don't know what's in 'em or why they work, but they do sound authentic, including the bridge pickup, and they don't make any noise.

My dealer had a swamp ash model called the T-Icon, with a '62 Fender-style neck carve (the '62 Pete'). It feels pretty '60s Fender to me, but smoother and silkier to play. However, Anderson has a couple of dozen different carves (!), with measurements on their site. If looking at neck specs is your thing, I'd imagine a Tele person can have a field day.

Anyway, I took the one with the '62 Pete neck. Plays like a champion. The neck was cooked in some way, and is as stable as my DGT's neck.

They're available with a variety of pickup choices. You can get anything you want.

I call it the Temporary Telecaster, but it's not for sale. I think my Fender-playing son would like it at some point.
 
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That is kind of you. I wasn’t really planning on having something built while in the vault that day. I just stopped in to say hi. But there was a great big chunk of Koa that I couldn’t resist drawing on. The top, fingerboard and headstock all came from the one piece of wood.
The dealer decided to build it as a drew it, whether I wanted the guitar or not. On the way home, Mrs got sad about someone else owning our design so we called back and took it.
Sounds like it'd be a very special guitar for several reasons.

And a lot of muscled up bad boy types.
Not that there's anything wrong with that!
 
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With The Cost Of Living The Way It Is Today You May Have A Point For A Short Term Sentence...LOL.
LOL!

There is a drawback. Prisons smell like pee.

When I was a boy lawyer and left the firm I worked for to start my own, building a practice wasn't easy. So I took a criminal appeal assignment. It was required that you visit the prisoner, introduce yourself and discuss the case.

So I traveled to Jackson Prison ('Jacktown') to interview the client. Jacktown is an old prison. The scent wafting into the interview room was overwhelming, as was the noise.

I quickly realized (a) it was abundantly clear that the client really did not get a fair trial, and (b) my mother did not raise me to visit jails.

It was my only visit to Jacktown. You do not want to be there for even one day!
 
You could try a de-mud mod on the neck pickup. It works very well, I did it on my DGT.

It's a .0047uf capacitor in parallel with a 220K resistor, it's inserted on the neck pickup's hot lead, in-between the pickup and it's volume pot.

There are various "de-mud mods" out there... Seymour Duncan has one, there's one called "Artie's De-Mud Mod". I used Artie's, but messed with the capacitor and resistor values (of whatever I had on hand) until I liked what I heard.

I'm actually going to be doing this today, on my EBMM Luke III's neck pickup.

I promised myself that I would not mod my DGT. I want it as it was intended.

But If DG asked me what might be done to improve his baby It would be this. With the amp set fat like he sets it, the bridge pickup tone is fat but tight. When you switch to the neck pickup with the volume up, the excess mud makes it unusable.

I saw your post and read the reference to this mod:

After much angst and gnashing of teeth, I broke down and carefully installed a .047mf (not .0047) capacitor and a 240K resistor in parallel as described in your post.

Using DG's settings on a DG custom 30 my neck pickup is now useful at volume full, split or blended.

Thank you for posting your de-mud mod.
 
I promised myself that I would not mod my DGT. I want it as it was intended.

But If DG asked me what might be done to improve his baby It would be this. With the amp set fat like he sets it, the bridge pickup tone is fat but tight. When you switch to the neck pickup with the volume up, the excess mud makes it unusable.

I saw your post and read the reference to this mod:

After much angst and gnashing of teeth, I broke down and carefully installed a .047mf (not .0047) capacitor and a 240K resistor in parallel as described in your post.

Using DG's settings on a DG custom 30 my neck pickup is now useful at volume full, split or blended.

Thank you for posting your de-mud mod.

I've used this mod in the past, and liked it. Had it on a push-pull on one guitar, which was cool, and IMO more useful than the coil split (that model didn't have a stock coil split, so I didn't lose anything). The push/pull went bad so I put it back to stock, but I should get another one and re-install the mod.
 
After much angst and gnashing of teeth, I broke down and carefully installed a .047mf (not .0047) capacitor and a 240K resistor in parallel as described in your post.

Using DG's settings on a DG custom 30 my neck pickup is now useful at volume full, split or blended.
While I don't find my neck pickup muddy - I tend to use a high pass filter when recording, anyway - this sounds like an intriguing mod for those that do.
 
After much angst and gnashing of teeth, I broke down and carefully installed a .047mf (not .0047) capacitor and a 240K resistor in parallel as described in your post.
So did I. It’s a very effective and simple mod if you’re having issues with booming bass or muddy sound. This mod makes dense chords sound open and transparent. I usually play clean on the neck pickup at lower volumes. While I liked the transparency on certain chords, I missed some balance and warmth and didn’t bond with the overall sound. The dual pickup setting also sounded brittle to me. In the end I left my DGT stock.
 
I don't know how difficult it is to build a neck humbucker that has these qualities (I have a Dimarzio Humbucker from Hell in the neck of my old Charvel, and it sounds almost single-coily on it's own), but it seems like more builders should be offering a neck PAF that has no mud... even if they build-in this simple capacitor mod. I've never understood why this seems to be a wide-ranging complaint amongst players, but hasn't been something builders have really corrected.

I know SD has their "Jazz" neck pickup, and as I said Dimarzio has the HFH... but how about a nice, fat-but-CLEAR neck humbucker with no mud? It seems a simple thing....

I even took this mod a step further on my EBMM Luke III... I decided I wanted an even less bass tone, something more like a single-coil sound, in the neck. The de-mud mod helped, but I wanted to try more. It's a 2HB guitar, I didn't want to put an actual HB-sized single in the neck because I wanted to retain the noiseless feature. So I increased the de-mud mod. It's working great. It doesn't sound like a strat single coil, but it does sound in-between a PAF and strat. I had called Lindy Fralin to ask for advice, but honestly I'm pretty happy with the mod.

I ended up with a .001uf + 470K, which is the "most mud I could remove" with parts I had on hand.
Adding the resistor can help if you don't have the next cap size you're looking for... I'm not an electronics guy, but this is how it was explained to me:

"you CAN put a capacitor in series with your neck pickup to cut some lows. But you will have to play with component values, and I suggest you also put a resistor in parallel with the cap (so that there is DC continuity from the pickup to the rest of the circuit). The overall tone is variable by the size of the cap and the size of the resistor. Start with .0022uf and 180k ohms. A larger cap will cut fewer lows, a smaller cap will cut more lows. A small resistor (<50k ohms) will reduce the effect of the cap. The smaller the resistor, the more lows bypass the cap)."
 
"you CAN put a capacitor in series with your neck pickup to cut some lows. But you will have to play with component values, and I suggest you also put a resistor in parallel with the cap (so that there is DC continuity from the pickup to the rest of the circuit). The overall tone is variable by the size of the cap and the size of the resistor. Start with .0022uf and 180k ohms. A larger cap will cut fewer lows, a smaller cap will cut more lows. A small resistor (<50k ohms) will reduce the effect of the cap. The smaller the resistor, the more lows bypass the cap)."
A small little PC board with a trim pot for the resistor would be ideal.
 
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