Thanks Wordman
I am a guitar freak as well. My current collection includes:
Eric Johnson Stratocaster (do you like these?..I love it!)
Larrivee L-09 acoustic
Les Paul Custom (2009)
Es-175
2 Classical Guitars (one made by a custom luthier in Japan…Sakurai)
I’d love to get a Tele.
Ah - you have an ES-175 - how’d my story go over with you - sound familiar? 
EJ Strats - I love the bigness of the neck - not sure if I would prefer the quarter-sawn wood (the grain runs parallel to the neck vs. any other direction; it is supposed to increase the brightness of the tone due to increased stiffness). If I get another Strat, it would likely be an Rosewood EJ (I wish they didn’t have bound necks) or a Jeff Beck sig…
What kind of LP Custom? I assume a Black Beauty or Randy Rhoads white/cream with humbuckers and gold hardware?
ETA: Oh, and I assume you meant “freak” in the nicest possible way…
Hank Marvin was one of my childhood heroes. I still have my Shadows 20 Golden Greats from like 1972. It only just occurred to me last week that I might actually be able to play some of those amazing songs. I started with Apache:-)
Hank Marvin wrote the intro for the Official Stratocaster book and he tells a great story of how he owned the very first strat that arrived in England. They had it flown in specially.
No argument on their awesomeness from me. IIRC the article was saying that if you took a poll on most influential electric guitar in rock history, you’d get plenty of votes for the tele, the strat and the Les Paul, with maybe a runner-up for the SG, OTOH, if you ask the same question for the country genre it’s the tele in a walk, great players of other gitfiddles notwithstanding.
Yeah, it’s a black beauty.
Yes the ES-175 story rings true…but I don’t know if I’d say all jazz players are amazing musicians. I’m a jazz player and I’m still learning the in’s and outs of rock and roll. It’s real easy to get lazy and slur everything in jazz, and rock can be more technically demanding sometimes IMHO.
…well, there’s sloppy in every genre, right?
Couldn’t agree more - it is more a case of a city cat trying to get along in the country vs. a country cat trying to get along in the city. I feel like I play simple major chords, but then I compare notes with a jazz guy and realize I know a ton of stuff in my world that he doesn’t. He whips out some flatted ninth chord and I pull out some palm-mutey trick to make some gut-bucket blues riff sound cool. It’s all good.
…but then I see that '54 ES-175 and wish I could pull off some Kenny Burrell or Wes Montgomery-type tricks and realize how unavailable they are to me…learning never stops.
And thats why music is AWESOME.
Thanks for the awesome thread.
Amen, and hope it never does
Thanks man.
I have a Peavy Focus. It falls into that “Sucky Electric Guitar” food group, somewhere underneath the “Recommended Guitars Pyramid”, never seeing the light of day…
I’m coming back to this thread, and it’s a lot more educational now than when I started.
As always, I’m trying to relate it to my XV-585 Not A Les Paul At All.
( http://www.guitarfetish.com/Xaviere-XV-585-Chambered-Mahogany-Carved-Top-quotCherry-Mahoganyquot_p_1178.html )
Let’s see what the specs say.
Scale Length- 24 3/4"
Width at Nut- 1 21/32" 1.656 in or 42.06875mm
Rick’s scale length is 24 and 3/4. Width at nut is 41.4 mm (1.63’')
Gibson’s is 24.75 in (629 mm) Nut Width on a Les Paul: 1.695 in (43.05 mm)
http://les-paul-guitar.blogspot.com/
A Strat is 25.5 in (648 mm), check. 1.685 nut width (42.7mm) (1.69 on my Starcaster)
Hm.
Tele scale length is 25.5, nut width is 1.650, looks like. (there are variants)
A: Yes, my guitar’s neck is narrow as hell. B: Really? Les Pauls are wider than Strats?
Wow. I so wanna contribute to this thread, but every guitar I’ve owned has been a cheap generic rip-off. I played an expensive one once, and the humbuckers were perfect for me. The meaty one was WAY meaty, and the softer one was gentle, but not watery like mine.
So, tell us about your rip-offs. Or do what I did, and rebuild your own. The Lipsticked Pig was a $70 guitar, and for about 120 in parts, I’ve made it a… I dunno, $400 one.
I’ve owned a few of the food groups. My first good one was a 67 Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman - the George Harrison one with the painted f holes. When that got stolen I went for a 78 Les Paul Custom and a 73 Stratocaster. The Strat is gone but the LP stayed. I added a 06 Telecaster.
Each sounded damn good, each in its own way and unlike Mr Setzer, my Gretsch never ever had any problems. I played a ES175 for a while but it wasn’t mine. I liked it because it had that full tone, and it was just right for finger picking too - the way my right hand just naturally hovered over the strings. My Gretsch was like that. On the current solid bodies I have to hold the hand just so, on a jazz box or acoustic, it just “wants” to go where it should.
I am down to two electrics now, the Les Paul and the Tele. And one acoustic, the Takamine.
I’ll look into that. Mind you, I did just hack my own hand trying to be creative and skillful…
I’l get the details of my axes and post 'em tomorrow. One’s a Magnum the other a Freedom. Both have pissy sound on the top strings, and I would like to try some decent humbuckers on 'em.
Well, heck, that’s not hard at all. But we should continue the ‘upgrade’ discussion over here.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=550219&page=17
I like to keep things organized.
It is a truth: Tele’s and Les Paul’s feel more alike in terms of playing and sound than either feel relative to a Strat. It is more likely a person will feel comfortable switching between LP’s and Tele’s, but if they dial into a Strat, they will be less likely to swap. Just an observation over many years - I may have mentioned it upthread…
My main guitar for 15 years was a 94 Strat Plus. I bought an Epiphone ES-335 about 6 years ago and used it as my backup stage guitar, and finished building a Telecaster about a year ago. For the past year, the Tele has been my main guitar, but the Strat still feels like home when I pick it up. I play the Tele for the tone, and because I built it, but every thing on the Strat just feels like it is where it belongs. I wonder how long it will take for the Tele to feel right to me?
When you have some songs or licks that you “found” on the Tele, or you figure out how to make something sound better on the Tele and find yourself feeling like you’re sacrificing something going back to the Strat. This is not an “every song, all the time” kinda feeling. It crept up on me - I didn’t like the tone of my Tele vs. my Les Paul’s initially…
Is there any aspect of your Strat’s feel that you can move over to the Tele? Is it a control layout situation or just neck and overall feel?
I don’t think that the things that make the Strat feel so right are transferable. When he was designing the Strat, one of the things Leo Fender did in response to feedback from Tele players was to smooth out some of the plankiness by removing some wood at the waist and where the player’s right arm rests. I guess I could start hacking at my Tele body until it had the same bevels as a Strat, but I don’t think I will. I am also very used to the control layout and functions on a Strat, but I’m learning to like the Tele controls.