Long Tele

The Fender Telecaster is an iconic guitar design. Fender Telecaster players especially have traditional taste in guitars, sometimes to an extreme degree. Don't mess with perfection, they might say. Purists will even eschew modern designs that fix what I consider to be flaws in the original design, like the truss rod that can't be adjusted without disassembling the neck from the guitar.

This design exercise is not for those people.

This design has a lot in common with the original, but the left side is extended vertically so the strap button is parallel to the 12th fret. The black pickguard shape extends to match. Now the waist of the guitar is asymmetrical so this is technically an "offset" body shape.

I've seen designers' take on the Telecaster and they tend to play it safe even if they claim to make radical changes:

• locking tuners
• vibrato tailpiece
• more/different pickups
• extended scale, 7- or 8-string versions
• multiscale frets

And while these changes would indeed be too radical for a purist, they're somehow comfortably distant from the core design so as to not be offensive. They're in an entirely different lane, and the Tele is still safely in its own lane.

With this "Long Tele" design I wasn't going for radically different. I was hoping to land squarely in the center of the uncanny valley. It's just close enough to the traditional design that at first glance it looks unremarkable. But upon closer inspection a Tele connoisseur will realize something is off in an unsettling way. It's obviously a Tele, but wrong.

For comparison, here's "Long Tele" next to its source image:

Despite the joy I derive from offending the sensibilities of a guitar design purist, there is a practical reason behind this mutant. By moving the upper strap button closer to the headstock end of the guitar, it balances better when worn with a strap. This allows for using lighter woods for the body (or a hollow/semi-hollow/chambered body) without the body becoming too light to balance the weight of the neck resulting in dreaded "neck dive".

Don't get me wrong, I actually love the visual aesthetics of the stock Tele. But I also think ergonomics are important, and this is my attempt at a different balance between looks and practicality.