In every art form, there are those who have mastered their craft so thoroughly, through years of training and experience, their work routinely commands extra acclaim and admiration, not to mention outright awe. Use this guide to design your very own Masterbuilt or Custom-Built Fender guitar and make your dreams come true. Custom-Built is for those prefer to start with one of our time-honored models and personalize the specifications to meet your specific needs. Welcome to the Fender Custom Shop.įor players who wish to create a completely custom instrument-anything from a humbucking pickup-equipped banjo to a custom-engraved aluminum-bodied Strat®-we offer Masterbuilt, a singular experience working one-on-one with one of our Master Builders. It’s no ordinary place, and the creations that come from it are no ordinary instruments. They’re the best at what they do, and they pour all of their passion, hard-earned knowledge and skill into every instrument they build. Custom Shop builders are completely dedicated to their art-part craftsman, part artist, part music fan and, more often than not, part mad scientist. It’s a bustling, noisy and creatively volcanic place that re-earns its nickname-the Dream Factory-every day. The Custom Shop is home to Fender’s most skilled and talented builders. It’s as if the instrument itself is imbued with history, alive with the spirit of the place where it was built and the devotion of those who crafted it. It’s filled with intangible, electrifying elements that add a new dimension to your playing experience. You know it when you play one-it’s definitely more than the sum of its parts. A flexible piezo layer surrounds the core conductor and the whole thing has a braided wire sheath along its length.A Fender Custom Shop instrument is extraordinary. Looking like a traditional electric guitar pickup hook-up cable, this UST uses a coaxial design with the hot conductor at the middle. Imagine a much thinner, more flexible, pickup than the red Fishman UST above. I actually worked on a ribbon-style transducer a couple of weeks ago and forgot to take a photo. If there’s a problem, you might want to clip or secure it inside the guitar. It can resonate with the top’s movement, or the air in the guitar, and cause feedback. The ‘working/active’ part of the pickup can be made longer and, once the slot is full, the unused portion just pokes though the hole in the bottom of the saddle.Īs a side note, be careful of this extra active part inside the guitar. All its internals are flexible and the whole thing can be easily bent (don’t kink it).īecause it’s more flexible, it’s not tied to a particular length of saddle or slot. Pickups like LR Baggs’ Ribbon don’t employ rigid conductors like the Fishman. It needs careful installation in a flat slot with a perfectly flat saddle bottom over it. Oh, and you should definitely be careful of the joint where the cable connects - it can be delicate. It doesn’t bend much (nor should you try bend it). The conductor strips and wrapping give this pickup an amount of rigidity. It has a piezo strip between two conductor strips (hot and ground) and it’s wrapped in a (grounded) shielding tape to keep any nasty electromagnetic interference (EMI) away from the internals. This is what I refer to as a ‘rigid’ UST. Each operates on essentially the same principal - a piezo ‘strip’ is sandwiched between a hot and ground conductor and is shielded all around in some way - but how they achieve this is slightly different. More possibilities opened up for UST pickup design and, as things have shaken out, we’ve ended up with three main types. Now it was possible to make a single element span the full length of a saddle slot. No more need for housings and individual elements for each string. Through the application of liberal amounts of “science” these boffins were able to make thin, flexible, plastic sheets that were essentially big, flat, piezo elements. Yeah, Science!Īround thirty years ago, men and women with high foreheads, wearing white coats, and carrying clipboards started doing weird things with various plastics. Careful positioning is more critical and they may not be ideal if your guitar has an odd string spacing. They work fine but, because there are six discrete elements, they can be fussy about placement - if each element isn’t directly under a string, you can easily have output imbalances from string to string. And this is what some USTs are still like, especially at the budget end of the market.
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