What type of neck pickup would you prefer on a "jazz" Tele?

[burchyk]

Humbucker for me

[Cunamara]

Genil is an under-the-radar great player to most of us. He posts a lot of really good stuff on YouTube including recently putting up an extensive interview with Mick Goodrick from 2009.

Genil Castro - YouTube

I found him maybe 15 years ago on YouTube when I was researching playing jazz on a Telecaster. A guy had turned up at a jazz workshop I was going to with his Tele, sounding wonderful; I think this was before I had ever heard of anybody else doing that. It wasn't quite the trend yet and there were only one or two Ed Bickert videos, but Genil turned up quite a bit.

So, a couple years later after my first post in the thread, I have two Telecasters. One of them has Bill-and-Becky Lawrence Micro Coils in it, which sound wonderful (with neodymium magnets), really outstanding pickups; the other is a semihollow Tele which has a Bill-and-Becky L280TN stacked neck pickup and a DiMarzio Area T bridge pick up (they're out of phase with each other, though, so the middle position is really quite muted). The Telecaster remains a great choice for playing jazz; to my ears, however, the single coils and stacked single coil footprint humbuckers sound better than the PAF style humbuckers. I have tried Seymour Duncans and Classic 57s in the semihollow Tele. The single coil footprint is just better to my ears.

The Micro Coils have excellent noise rejection for single coils and the L280 and Area Ts have no noise- that Tele is my quietest guitar!

[Cunamara]

I've toyed around with the idea of putting a mini-humbucker in my Tele and talked to my luthier about this - he cautioned me : if I combine a humbucker with a normal single coil (I'd leave the original pup in the bridge) I'll have "problems" with the pot (and resistor cap)-values and their reactance with the different types of pickup when I switch to the middle position. If I'd only use the neck pup exclusively it would be ok to match the circuit to THIS one pup but it would not be the adequate choice for both. How do you guys solve this ?

You can add a resistor in parallel between the hot lead of the bridge pickup to ground. If you use 500k pots for the humbucker, you can make the bridge pickup "see" 250k this way (it's not perfect but good enough), which will keep the bridge pickup from being too harsh but cutting some of the highs. I don't know the math but there is a formula for this.

I do this on my Teles with regular pickups; a 220k resistor tames the bridge pickup nicely and means I don't have to twiddle the tone knob so much when switching pickups. For example:

Tele 3 Way Wiring Diagram – Bill and Becky Wilde Pickups

How To Use Resistors In A Guitar & Cool Tricks | Fralin Pickups

I've never found the bridge pickup on a Tele useable, but this mod (Bill Lawrence's, without the treble bleed circuit on the volume pot) makes it so. Also, Lindy Fralin has a lot of good technical information on his web site.

[Cunamara]

I posted this in another discussion thread -

For what it's worth, Fender sells a volume pot for just such a situation; it has both 500k and 250k on a dual-ganged pot, and might be a good idea for those who use a humbucking neck pickup:

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/0990847000--fender-dual-500k-250k-split-shaft-potentiometer

This will solve your problem at minimal cost and without any trouble.

I use this in a Strat with a single coil in the neck (actually a Bill Lawrence L280N) and PAF style humbuckers in the middle and bridge positions. The neck pickup sees a 250k volume and tone pot with a 0.047 cap; the humbuckers see a 500k volume pot and tone pots (stacked concentric, so each has their own tone control) and 0.022 caps. The 250k tone pot is a push-pull switch to "split" the PAFs (using the Fralin partial split resistor diagram, which only partially shunts one coil to ground).