Guitar World Keef reveals the One Guitar & lots of great guitar tricks

Excerpts:

"Richards received Micawber in December 1970 on his 27th birthday from fellow Fender fan Eric Clapton....Exile on Main Street.

According to Fender, the guitar originally featured the standard single-coil pickup in the neck position. After the Stones’ 1972 tour, Richards replaced it with a Fifties-era Gibson PAF humbucker, which he turned backward so that the magnet poles are facing the guitar’s tail, which brightens the humbucker’s naturally dark tone.

The bridge pickup has been up to debate. For years it was believed that Richards used an original Broadcaster bridge pickup, an exceedingly rare single-coil of which few were made. Others have suggested it’s a lap-steel pickup (the fact that the pickup is held on by just two screws seems to support this), though some former Fender employees who apparently worked with the guitar say it’s actually an early Telecaster bridge pickup that is wound extra hot.

The guitar’s wiring is the real question. Richards almost always has the pickup selector in the bridge position (position 1), but the humbucker’s tone seems to be evident, which suggests something has been altered in its electronics. In their standard configuration, Telecasters are wired with the master volume closest to the pickup selector; the second knob is the tone control.

But some have suggested that Richards has the guitar wired in Fender’s early Broadcaster/Nocaster/Telecaster configuration, which includes a master volume and a blend control. If so, in position 1 the bridge pickup would be active, and the blend control would allow him to dial in the amount of the humbucker neck pickup he desires. Position 2 would be neck pickup only, with the blend deactivated, and position 3 would activate the neck pickup and a tone capacitor that would reduce treble response for a dark tone."

"Beyond its pickups, Micawber can be identified by its missing 17th-fret marker. Richards has made other modifications to the guitar, such as Sperzel locking tuners and a modified brass bridge in which the low E saddle is removed to accommodate his five-string tuning.

Richards was well into using that tuning at the time he received the guitar from Clapton.

“Around the same time I was getting into Telecasters I was experimenting with open tunings,” Richards told Guitar World in 2002. “I don’t know why. Maybe it was because around that time, ’67, we started having time off that we didn’t know what to do with. So I started to experiment with tunings.

“Most people used open tuning basically just for slide. Nobody used it for anything else. But I wanted to use it for rhythm guitar. And what I found was, of all the guitars, the Telecaster really lent itself well to a dry, rhythm, five-string drone thing. In a way that tuning kept me developing as a guitarist. ‘Okay, now figure out a diminished sixth on it!’ You’ve got so little to work with. And that makes you reconsider six-string concert tuning. ‘Cause if there’s so much in that little space [i.e., five-string] how much am I missing on the other? You can transfer some of that back to six-string concert tuning. You can swap knowledge between one tuning and another.”

In related news, Richards recently said the Rolling Stones’ next album is “in the can,” adding that “it might be a surprise to people, and I can’t say any more than that right now.”

The Stones were in the studio late last year, and according to Richards the sessions were extremely productive. “The Stones have never cut so many tracks in such a short time,” he said. “That’s not necessarily a guarantee of a good record, but there’s something in the works, and I’d just like to leave it up there in mystery land.”

Guitarist Ron Wood elaborated on the sessions in a separate interview with the Associated Press.

“We went in to cut some new songs, which we did, but we got on a blues streak,” he said. “We cut 11 blues in two days. They are extremely great cover versions of Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter, among other blues people. But they really sound authentic.

“When we heard them back after not hearing them for a couple of months, we were, ‘Who’s that? It’s you.’ It sounded so authentic.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-06-19 07:26 by KevinM.

I think Gram Parsons gave him the guitar in 1971 while recording Exile.
The neck pickup was replaced before or during the US Tour 1972. Watching the Ladies & Gentlemen concert film, you can see that the guitar has a Humbucker in the neck position. Watching the Montreux rehearsals, you can see it has the original single coil pickup

From the 1972-tour. Humbucker installed, but not reversed yet.

Thank You kindly for posting . Guitar news is always important to me , so I greatly appreciate this , and I can never ever have enough guitar news or guitars

ratbag boogie guitar index
A good reason to bring these threads (compiled by withsssoul) up again