What Happens When You Pull Nylon Strings on a Telecaster?
An electric guitar and nylon strings don't work very well together. The reason is more than simple—standard magnetic pickups cannot detect the vibrations of strings that don't contain metal, so if you try to plug such an instrument into an amplifier, you won't get a note out of it. Despite the obvious incompatibility, guitarist Seiji Igusa, an Ibanez factory player who strung his $80 Telecaster copy with classical guitar strings, has a different take on the matter.
The experienced fingerstyle player recorded the instrument with a microphone and the question remains whether he also used a piezo system in the recording published on YouTube. Even if he did, the outcome of the test is a surprisingly musical sound, applicable to recordings of many genres. You can appreciate the sound of the Telecaster fitted with nylons in the attached video.
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