Anyone tried making a Jaguar with Jazzmaster pickups

[repoman]

I have a Jag and a Jazzmaster. I really like the way the Jaguar plays but don't really like the pickups that much, I really like the sound of the Jazzmaster but would really like the JM sound with the short scale playability of the Jag.
Anyone ever made a Jag with JM pickups? Does the short scale make a huge difference in the sound?

Anyway to get JM pickup sound in a Jag pickup? The pickups in both Jag and JM are AVRI.

[rumfoord]

There are these I know of:

http://curtisnovak.com/pickups/JMx-Jag.shtml

[Embenny]

Yep, all you need are some JMX-JAG pickups and a pickguard from Pickguardian and you can test it out yourself.

The short answer is that the scale makes a significant difference in the tone, but probably not as big as the pickups. What you get when you hybridize them is something that is more "Jazzmastery" but not a 1:1 copy of the tone. It may be exactly what you're looking for, or it may not be quite far enough. Only you could judge.

[dylanafghjkl]

i've been wanting to do it for years but i've read from a bunch of people that did it that you end up with a "worst of both worlds" thing and they end up swapping the pickups back out

still probably gonna do it one day

[jimboyogi]

Does anyone make a conversion neck so that you could put a 24" scale neck onto a jazzmaster body?

[andy_tchp]

Won't sound like a Jazzmaster.

Does the short scale make a huge difference in the sound?

Yes.

[dylanafghjkl]

Does anyone make a conversion neck so that you could put a 24" scale neck onto a jazzmaster body?

i had a quick look a year or two ago and i couldnt find anyone obviously doing them

i'm planning on building (at least one of) these when some neck building stuff later this year.

with the 648mm scale (25.5" for the americans reading), when you lop off the first fret you end up with 611.631mm which i'm sure would feel pretty much the same as 610mm (24"). with an overhanging fretboard you might be able to fit 21 frets on it but it'd start getting hard to adjust the height on the pickups. it might be possible to fit 22 frets on it to make it feel more like a jag but there'd only be about ~3mm between the last fret and the main body of the jazzmaster pickup cover

[Embenny]

Does anyone make a conversion neck so that you could put a 24" scale neck onto a jazzmaster body?

For conversion necks, you're just lopping off frets. Capo your JM at the first fret and tune back down the semitone to E standard. You now have a 24.029" scale Jazzmaster (the first fret is 1.431" from the nut). Only problem (if it's a problem for you) would be that the fret markers don't line up anymore.

I've always been curious as to why we see 24.75" conversion necks for strat/tele/JM, but not 24" (well, technically 24.029").

I guess it's a "same difference" issue at that point as to whether you route a Jaguar body for JM pickups and use a regular 24" Jag neck, or make a conversion neck for a standard JM body. Plenty of builders will route you JM pickups on a Jag (or you can do the Novak thing with any stock Jag, which appears to be by far the simplest solution in practical terms - plus his pickups are top-notch).

Edit: Dylan beat me to it by a minute or two with metric measurements, but I'll leave the imperial ones above for the Americans on the board.

[repoman]

I had an extra Jag body and some JM pickups so I cobbled this together. It really does not sound like a JM, but it doesn't sound like a Jag either, although I would say it sounds closer to a Jag than a JM which I found interesting. Maybe the Neck pickup sound is closer to JM than Jag. I had always chalked up 95% of the sound of a guitar to the pickups which I see is not true.
Something else I found interesting was that the one major characteristic that I had wanted to get rid of with this pickup swap was a "honky" mid range coming out of the bridge pickup on the Jag that is absent from JMs. With this swap, that "honky" mid range is still there. I do like the sound more than a stock Jag though, it sounds a bit more lush and less plinky.

[Embenny]

Yep, that midrange (and a lot of the tonal characteristics) of a Jag or Mustang has a lot to do with the scale, woods, and bridge.

I have had HH jags, Mustangs, JMs, and strats, and even with the same pickups (I swapped them around), they all sounded very different.

I happen to love "hybrid" designs, so Jag pickups in a JM, JM pickups in a Jag, Gretsch pickups in a Tele, Tele pickups in a JM - all of those things appeal to me, but none of them sound exactly like their "parent" Instruments.