Upgrading my JM to it's full potential, the neverending modding ! (2024 : New pickguard year ?)

[garyptaszek]

I dig that. The purple knobs look great too. The piezo is an interesting addition, is it something useable on its own, or more just to accompany the magnetic pickups?

Honestly it was more an experiment than anything else, so far I like to have it to switch from a standard "hi-fi" and really bassy jazzmaster sound to a tinny "distorted portable radio" sound. It also picks up string vibrations on the whole length, so you really hear the strings behind the bridge or between the headstock and tuner if you touch them. It has kind of a nasty high-end fizz, but the tone knob comes in handy to tame that.

TBF I can't play with anything than my tiny practice amp or the amp sims in my DAW now, so I'm not really sure it could be anything else than a feedback-fest at practice/stage volume.

Sounds pretty interesting. Most of the time I remove everything but the 3-way and a volume pot from my guitars, but part of me wants to put together a jazzmaster with all different switches and pickups etc. I like the idea of picking up all the overtones for a drone shoegaze sound.

[Flurko]

Some update on that guitar, I finally took time to shim the neck with a stewac 1° pre-made shim, the bridge now doesn't sit flush on the pickguard and the break angle behind the bridge is way better.

I had to put cardboard under the pickups to have something for the screws to grab into, as the pickup route floor is lower than on a normal jazzmaster, given that it was previously routed for humbuckers...
This just got me wondering :

Why on earth aren't jazzmaster pickups pickguard mounted, like on a strat ? It just makes no sense to me to unscrew both the pickguard and the pickups to work on the guitar, especially compared with previous fender models like the strat, where everything but the jack is on the pickguard and the tele where the pickguard is a completely separate entity from the pickups and electronics... Just annoying.

[Embenny]

When they were designed, there was no such thing as aftermarket parts. There were no pickups to swap. There were no pickguard vendors. The slight annoyance of unscrewing pickups and a pickguard from the body was not viewed as something that would need to be done outside a repair service context, and these parts were not prone to breaking down (how many JMs have original electronics half a century later?)

If you think it's annoying to unscrew a pickguard and pickups, you've definitely never owned a semi-hollow guitar. Fishing electronics through an F-hole - now that is annoying.

I don't understand the way you phrased your statement about the cardboard - there's no situation where you should ever be screwing into cardboard, that's not gonna hold. If your pickup screws can't reach wood and you can't source longer screws, you need to glue wood into the routs to give them something to bite into.

[Flurko]

You're right, they weren't probably expecting people to keep taking their guitar apart and rebuilding them every month like we do on here.

Funny you should mention the semi-hollow, I just acquired a very cheap and nasty PRS hollow-body copy, and I'm not looking forward to replacing the electronics and that one ! But I still find it less annoying than the system of pickup screws + foam + pickguard mounted electronics everywhere on the JM.

I read you on the cardboard thing- It's not intended to be permanent, I just wanted to have the pickups at a correct height to test sounds. I just don't have anything to plug the routes correctly at my disposal, that's another of the long lists of annoyances about that particular guitar, which I still love dearly .

[Flurko]

And yet another update :

I had bought a one-ply white pickguard online because I was tired of the all-black livery. I had to move around some screw holes to get it to fit, and in the end It didn't reallly work for me :



In the process I redid the wiring in a traditional JM style, only to find after a lot of troubleshooting -my bad soldering joints always get messed up when I transfer everything back in place- that my bridge pickup was now dead.

I switched to other more easy going projects which didn't require this musch pickguard screws removing, and awful pickup screw/foam handling (see post above), then I ordered yet another pickguard, this time from a Chinese seller on ebay who sells a few different colored aluminium guards.

I now really like the look and feel of this guitar, this was one of my goals all along but until now I couldn't find a cheap enough alu guard, this one was under 15€, shipping included :


The bridge pickup is now a humbucker from my 8-string guitar, and it fits perfectly under a JM cover, I just put some foil under the polepieces hole to have something shiny there, it looked weird with the black bobbins showing.

I tried previously to put a tele bridge pickup I just received under there, but I was really surprised by how weak it sounded next to the standard JM neck pickup, even with the pups adjusted to their maximum feasible positions, there was to much inbalance. No such problem with the humbucker, I just need to swap the wires on one off the pickups to get rid of the out of phase sound in the middle position.

[Veitchy]

That guitar looks great - I love the mid 50s Tele vibe you get with that finish, which isn't a common look with Jazzmasters.

[Shadoweclipse13]

Oh yeah! That looks great with the plain aluminum guard!!

[garyptaszek]

Every time I think you’ve nailed it, you make it look even cooler

[Flurko]

Thanks for the kind words !

That guitar looks great - I love the mid 50s Tele vibe you get with that finish, which isn't a common look with Jazzmasters.

I'm actually thinking way too much about what kind of knobs should go on this to drive the fifties look home. I switched from chrome barrel knobs to black ones, they go better with the black plastics but look kinda cheap.

Just wondering what would be lying around in the Fender drawers when they were thinking up offset guitars in the late fifties

Edit : just found a picture of a vintage Fender lap steel, I guess black metal knobs are somehow vintage accurate AND match the color scheme I arrived at !

[Veitchy]

That's a helluva find. Whilst I'm no expert on Fender lap steels, I certainly haven't seen one in that colour configuration before.

Very cool stuff.

[Flurko]

That's a helluva find. Whilst I'm no expert on Fender lap steels, I certainly haven't seen one in that colour configuration before.

Very cool stuff.

I don't know much about lap steels, but this particular one is a Fender Champ from 1956 :



It's pretty interesting to look at steels to find interesting color schemes from the big companies, but never used on guitars, Gibson in particular was more adventurous with the space age stylings on some of theirs.

[Veitchy]

It's pretty interesting to look at steels to find interesting color schemes from the big companies, but never used on guitars, Gibson in particular was more adventurous with the space age stylings on some of theirs.

That's interesting in that it's seemingly a reversal of the styling traits we tend to attribute to Gibson* and Fender, at least for most of the 50s, where Fender seem very modern and Gibson has all these acoustic instrument constriction holdovers.

There certainly are some great cues to be found in these instruments. One of my favorite Fender models of the last decade was the GE Smith telecaster, that had a bunch of design elements borrowed from some of GEs early 50s Champion steels.

*NB the Explorer/Flying V/Moderne, which were radical and great, but certainly an outlier compared to Gibson's other designs of the time.

[Flurko]

It's been a while since my last post in this thread !

I managed to fix the bridge pickup, for some reason the leads werent properly connected to the pickups and I had a dead reading with the multimeter, but after flowing some solder where it's connected to the pickup it's now working alright !
I must have swapped the pickup leads sometime in the process as the middle position was all thin and noisy, but after swapping them back it's now as glorious as it ever was.

The rythm circuit is now wired to work with both pickups, it's pretty fun to have a "normal" sounding guitar when it's engaged and an extra-klangy jazzmaster in the lead position !

I also broke the original trem arm when trying to fit it all the way in the collet, which gave me an excuse to purchase a Staytrem arm + collet, it's on par with buying proper JM pickups as the single best upgrade I made on this guitar, it's a pleasure to use, the arm is ultra responsive and stays where you want it to.

A less necessary "upgrade" are the saddles : I had small grooved telecaster saddles from a random chinese ebay seller, which worked alright but the brass plating was flaking off and they looked cheap, so I bought a set of Wilkinson compensated grooved tele saddles, which look way better but I now have a buzzing sound on some open strings, the particular string that buzzes changes depending on how the bridge height/saddle height ratio is set. Quite annoying except for 1% of the time when you want a sitar sound. Here's how the bridge looks :



I also had to place some spacers under the pickguard near the rythm circuit because everything would short out if it was screwed all the way in, I should probably open everything up and either work on shielding or chisel some of the wood under it.

I maintain my previous point that this is one of the worst guitar design to mod, Removing the strings, the bridge and the pickups to work on the wiring makes it really annoying !

[Unicorn Warrior]

It's been a while since my last post in this thread !

I managed to fix the bridge pickup, for some reason the leads werent properly connected to the pickups and I had a dead reading with the multimeter, but after flowing some solder where it's connected to the pickup it's now working alright !
I must have swapped the pickup leads sometime in the process as the middle position was all thin and noisy, but after swapping them back it's now as glorious as it ever was.

The rythm circuit is now wired to work with both pickups, it's pretty fun to have a "normal" sounding guitar when it's engaged and an extra-klangy jazzmaster in the lead position !

I also broke the original trem arm when trying to fit it all the way in the collet, which gave me an excuse to purchase a Staytrem arm + collet, it's on par with buying proper JM pickups as the single best upgrade I made on this guitar, it's a pleasure to use, the arm is ultra responsive and stays where you want it to.

A less necessary "upgrade" are the saddles : I had small grooved telecaster saddles from a random chinese ebay seller, which worked alright but the brass plating was flaking off and they looked cheap, so I bought a set of Wilkinson compensated grooved tele saddles, which look way better but I now have a buzzing sound on some open strings, the particular string that buzzes changes depending on how the bridge height/saddle height ratio is set. Quite annoying except for 1% of the time when you want a sitar sound. Here's how the bridge looks :



I also had to place some spacers under the pickguard near the rythm circuit because everything would short out if it was screwed all the way in, I should probably open everything up and either work on shielding or chisel some of the wood under it.

I maintain my previous point that this is one of the worst guitar design to mod, Removing the strings, the bridge and the pickups to work on the wiring makes it really annoying !

I just came to say I love everything about this guitar and the fact you’ve rocked it so long. It looks great and that aluminum pg really sets it off. Not a common take on a JM

[Flurko]

I just came to say I love everything about this guitar and the fact you’ve rocked it so long. It looks great and that aluminum pg really sets it off. Not a common take on a JM

Thanks ! It's been my main guitar for more than ten years now, I have bought and sold some others since but mostly cheap ones, the only higher quality guitar I got is a vintage acoustic, so no comparison here !

I still need to fix the buzzing saddle issue, I also had to set the action higher than on any of my other guitars to be able to make whole tone bends in the upper frets, I don't really understand what I would need to do in terms of setup to adress this ? the neck relief seems similar to my other guitars (basically the same room under a string fretted at both ends of the fingerboards and the 12th fret).

A last point on a purely aesthetic issue : Does anyone know what kind of decal would look right on this neck ? Small headstock, maple fingerboard... I have no issue putting a Fender logo on this as both the neck and body are genuine.