Upgrading the Paranormal Telecaster With Creamery Pickups

Okay. I have the valve amp. I have the fancy wah-wah pedal and the Helix FX. I have double-humbuckers (McCarty 594 SE). I have the Paranormal Telecaster, which ticks so many boxes (Tele bridge pickup, Jazzmaster neck pickup, Tele controls, offset body, out-of-phase and in-phase series and parallel). What next? According to the Guitar Nerd Scorecard, at some point I have to change the pickups on one or more of my guitars. Not going to be the PRS, so it had to be the Paranormal. The stock pickups were a tad fragile and rough round the edges unless the treble was turned down, and if the treble was turned up, the sound was spikey and thin. There was a general lack of finesse about the sound.

The standard upgrade for pickups is Seymour Duncan. There are others, which are mostly about getting a more "high-performance" sound, and are American. As is Seymour Duncan. Dylan Talks Tone - who is an American pickup maker - said we should a) buy his, or b) support our local pickup maker. So off to Google I went, looking for UK pickup makers. There are more than I thought there would be. They have well put-together websites and descriptions of their products. Also very similar prices, none of which are too far from Seymour Duncan's. Guitar reddit had no firm views, so I went someone from the top of the search list who offered some "vintage" voiced pickups.

This was Jamie at Creamery Pickups. I sent him a mail with a photo of the Paranormal and an explanation of what I wanted, and my guess that what I needed was his Classic 58 Jazzmaster neck and the Vintage Nocaster bridge pickups. A couple of mails later, I put in an order on his website, sent the money and sat back for the four-five weeks it takes. (All of them gave that kind of lead time.) Right on time Jamie sent them by mail, and I hustled them and the Paranormal into the guys at Richmond Guitar Workshop (no website, only Facebook page). They fitted the pickups and gave the Paranormal, a clean-up, re-string and fitted a better selector switch and cable socket.

Did it make a difference? Oh hell yeah. Jamie's pickups are rich and full, as in... oh so that's what a Jazzmaster neck pickup is supposed to sound like and ah, a Tele bridge that sounds clear but not twangy. Turn up the treble on the Jazzmaster neck and it reveals a complicated sound, put the treble near the middle and it's clear and full. I can crank the volume up and run it into the Princeton at about 3.5 and get a satisfying bedroom-volume sound. It's now a "proper-sounding" instrument, rather than a cheap (it is a Squier) curiosity.

London Bridge Concourse

So this week's sunny day was Monday, and on my way to lunch, I went to London Bridge and then down and across Tower Bridge. Nice walk, even if the wind was chilly halfway across Tower Bridge. Anyway... London Bridge has a new clock for people to meet under, there's an obligatory Passenger Asleep On A Bench, and the People On The Escalator shot may be one of my favourites from this year already. The last two are the kind of architectural angle-y shots I like. Despite its heavy use over quite a few years, the concourse is still clean and shiny. Somebody cares, or maybe somebody else wrote it into the contract.

Autumn

 

Fujinon XF 18-135 - If I Get A Zoom

So I went back over what I had taken in Photos. Because Photos has the Get Info panel, and that tells you the lens details - at least if the data was available.

Sometime in 2009 I started using the Canon Powershot A590 IS. The lens is said to be 5.8 - 23.2mm, and the Canon specs say that the 35mm equivalent is 35-140mm. I seemed to have stopped using it towards the end of 2011, which is when I stopped going on holidays, and switched to using a C510 phone camera and then the iPhone 4S, sometime in 2012.

In 2013 I started using a Canon EOS1100D, which was an APS-C camera with a 35mm equivalent of 24-80mm. It's a chunky bit of kit.

Sometime in 2014 until sometime in 2018 I started using a Panasonic DMS TZ-40, with a 35mm equivalent of 24-480mm, some of which may be digital zoom. I used the iPhone SE camera for a while between 2019 and 2021.

At the end of 2021 started using the Fujifilm X-E4, with the 50mm-equivalent lens, which I swapped in late 2024 for the 40mm-equivalent pancake lens. Because it's easier to carry and made a change.

None of those cameras were expensive by the standards of the time. The EOS110D was about half the price of the X-E4, which shows in the quality of the Fuji kit. I still have the EOS1100D and the DMS TZ-40.

That Get Info panel also tells you the focal length of the zoom lens. Which is super-useful.

(All sizes are now 35mm-equivalent unless otherwise mentioned.)

The majority of the shots I have kept are taken at one end of the range or the other of the lens. The more zoom it offered, the more I seemed to look for shots that would use that much zoom. A lot of the landscape / cityscape shots I liked enough to keep were either around 35mm or 120mm. Some went the full 480mm the TZ-40 would allow. I feel that 82mm is really just cropping the picture in camera, whereas 100-120mm is a different picture. The silly focal lengths of the TZ-40 were a bit of a spoiler. The shots that have intermediate focal lengths are really me cropping in camera. (Cropping in camera is not a Bad Thing: the picture quality is higher than a cropped picture would be.) All the people shots I like were 120mm or more. Do that with a small camera and no-one will notice. Try to get a 120mm zoom shot of someone sitting a few feet away with an APS-C lens and they will notice. That takes a certain amount of social skills I might not have.

The Fujinon zooms that are not too large, too heavy or too silly, are the XF 16-80, the XF 18-135, the XF 18-120, the XF 16-55, and the XF 18-55. The 18-120 has internal zoom (which is cool), but Fuji says that it is really for videographers. Shame. The x-55's are not zoomy enough: 55mm feels like cutting-out-clutter-around-the-subject. I can see why portrait snappers use it. That leaves the 16-80 and the 18-135. Both are about the same (second-hand) price, size and weight. Both lenses extend during zoom, which is a little... naff, but unavoidable.

Looking at my pictures, the more zoom I have, the more zoomy pictures I can see and will take. On that basis, the answer is the 16-135.

So why am I not rushing onto the Interwebz to buy one?

Zooming is a little like photography candy: it's sweet and addictive. It's one reason I deliberately bought a prime when I got the X-E4. Taking shots with a prime between 35mm and 50mm is a discipline. Anyone can zoom in on a neat detail, and I have enough shots to prove I can do it well, but composing a whole shot is much more of a challenge. So there's that. You know, suffering for my art. And this whole exercise is assuming I am buying second-hand. New prices for these lenses are... I mean, you can a Player Series Strat for that kind of money. It's outside my costs-as-much-as-a-256GB-iPad (£429) rule.