Chris Shiflett & The Dead Peasants – Chris Shiflett & The Dead Peasants

In this video, Chris Shiflett talks about his signature model Tele Deluxe:

"I have a new Fender signature guitar, it just came out. And what it is it's a Telecaster Deluxe, and we made a few a modifications to make it just a little more rock friendly.

So the main thing that we changed about this guitar is that normally a Tele Deluxe has wide range pickups. So we swapped out the wide wide range pickups for humbuckers, so it's a little beefier tone. They normally have a maple fretboard, and we used rosewood - it’s a little warmer, nicer. And they also usually have a 3-bolt neck back here, and we did 4 cause its a little more stable. And of course they don't normally have my name on written on the back of em, but we put that on here as well. We worked for a few months to get this thing together, we ran through a couple prototypes and wound up with this.

As far as my signature sound, or my sound that I’m most comfortable playing with has always been humbuckers. I was always a humbucker guitar player. I grew up playing in rock n roll bands. As a teenager, sort of not knowing what was what, that I plugged in a single coil pickup guitar, it just freaked me out and scared me and sounded so thin and weird and jangly that I didn't know what to do with it so I always ran back to a guitar with humbuckers.

And especially in in Foo Fighters you gotta have a humbucker, it's just that kinda sound - big meaty rock chords and stuff. With the Dead Peasants, I like playing a single coil pickup like a regular Tele. But for anything Foo Fighters and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, anything that's rockin, I have to have humbucker pickups, so that’s what we went with."