Hate Filled & Borrowed

Blackford Hill, Edinburgh

Cedar Cafe, Scottish Borders

Squier CV Telecaster ‘Nashville Summers’

Since I bought this guitar for £250 S/H it has experienced a few changes. The first of which was turning it into somewhat of a replica of Kurt Cobain’s final favourite guitar, his sunburst ‘62 telecaster custom with a 6-saddle humbucker bridge, open coil black humbucker and covered neck humbucker in the neck position. However, since then I have installed a Fender ‘Tex-Mex’ strat pickup in the middle position, changed the 3-way switch out for a 5-way ‘superswitch’ to allow for the ‘nashville’ wiring configuration and a mini switch to allow the humbucker to be split. However, I recently decided to change the neck for a Squier CV 50s one, which makes the guitar sound far more percussive and bright for country/funk tones. I like to play country and lots of Prince tones on this guitar, and the 5-way switch provides a lot of flexibility. 

I have changed the Gotoh 6-saddle humbucker bridge for the standard single coil version. The current bridge pickup is a Bare Knuckle ‘Yardbird’, which has a little bit of extra grunt to it, but still provides the classic tele sound. Since there is no longer a humbucker in the bridge position, I have wired the split switch to the Seymour Duncan ‘Pearly Gates’ in the neck position. Being a fairly vintage/low-output humbucker, the split does not make too much of a difference. However, it does it make it less muddy, which is useful for when you want a clearer tone for funk/country, and for the neck and middle position. 

Squier Affinity Shell Pink Stratocaster 

I got this on Gumtree for £60

It’s actually quite a good playing strat, despite being a value one, but I guess the ‘bullet’ series is now the bottom range, so these are an improvement over the older ‘affinity’ series guitars. 

I replaced the stock pickups with a set of Vanson ‘classic pro’ Alnico V for £38, which sound good, but I later swapped the bridge pickup out for a Seymour Duncan ‘Hot Rails’. I initially changed the electronics to Alpha 250k pots, but I later changed the volume pot to a Gotoh 500k to open up the bridge pickup a bit. I also installed a mini switch to allow the Hot Rails to be split. It doesn’t really sound weaker than in humbucking mode, but it makes it sound significantly brighter, which makes it sound better for position 2 in conjunction with the middle pickup for country/funk tones. 

I had an issue with the stock tremolo springs as they created a huge amount of excess noise and feedback. I swapped them out for a set of ‘silent’ springs for £9 on Ebay.

The only other modification is the replacement of the stock string trees to American Standard style ones