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Emerson Custom 4-Way Harness. A Short Review.

Updated: Sep 1, 2023

For my Telecaster, i equipped a pre-wired harness on it. This was in the early days before i got a solder iron and parts myself. Here is a short review of the Emerson Custom 4-way Harness


The Emerson Custom 4-Way Harness

The harness is good quality. As-good-as-it-can-get on the joints and neat and tidy enough. Telecaster wiring is hardly an advanced piece of wiring either. It comes with their own PIO caps which make it look nice. PIO caps have little value to me other than that it looks vintage & cool. I dont really care about the caps.. they all do their job fine and i hear NO difference in them. Capitance is capitance. They have they own CTS produced pots and a OAK Grigsby switch to round up the package. And it is all wired up with clothwire and shrinkhose on some of the solder ends.

My Control plate was not of a standard kind. The holes was a little bit narrower (Like the Callaham control plates) so i had to bend the buswire slightly to make it fit.

However though. two things i disliked about it..

1: Emerson uses solid-core cloth wire all over. Which is wrong. Solid core are fine when you use it as bridge jumpers, bridging and such (in other words, wire you solder on and you never touch, move or wiggle around). The wires to the jack was also solid-core, that resulted in me breaking off the wire from the pots when i was to tuck it in the cavity. Stranded wire is just the way to go. Not sure why Emerson has selected solid-core on everything.

2: BOTH my pots was linear taper. They had to be, swear to God. Now its normal that Audio pot has Audio taper and Tone has linear, but mine was all linear. I simply DISLIKE linear taper on everything and anything potentiometers. So out they went and was replace with Audio taper. But this might not be a bad thing for you. Pot taper is a subjective thing.

I also tore out the treble bleed. I dont know, i just think my guitars sound better without them. But again, a personal preference. But it is a good quality product. You get their expensive PIO caps and all. Looks awesome. I will most definitely never buy prewired again. This was my first of two harnesses i bought and my second ended the same fate of being butchered to my liking. More fun to solder your own and get what you need, and experiment with caps and/or treble bleeds as well.



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