Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

[BTL]

I'm a huge fan of Lindy Fralin's hum cancelling designs. I can't speak to their vintage accuracy, but the ones I've used sound exactly like I hoped they would: bright, clear single-coil tone, but without the hum.

An interesting bit of trivia: Lindy wound the very first pickup that ultimately became the Big Single for me to use in a bass guitar. It looks and sounds spectacular and, you guessed it, no hum.

[jonnyrocket]

I also don't understand what can be so different about them, they are humbuckers of some variant I can only imagine. I took the cover off, but the rest of the pickup was wrapped so I couldn't tell if it was some kind of stacked or side by side coil, side by side would be my guess because the pickups aren't very deep.

But they sound good, and they are noiseless, and they do sound like Jazzmaster pickups, I'll give them that.

Do you know if regular Jazzmaster pickup covers fit them?

[jonnyrocket]

There's plenty of room for variations on a theme within a Jazzmaster cover, but ultimately your two coils either have to be next to each other, on top of each other, or within each other (i.e. concentric). Fralin went for a single set of magnets with side by side sidewinder coils. Mojotone doesn't do JMs, but their other Fender "quiet coils" are blade magnets side by side like tiny Firebird pickups. Kinman is a stacked design (albeit a highly engineered one). Novak does side by side coils.

I could imagine multiple ways you could call a noiseless JM "built differently" from current options. A P90-sized coil around the magnets with a narrow air coil wedged into one edge. A Thunderbird pickup with the magnet removed from one coil. An asymmetrically-wound Firebird pickup.

All of those could easily be wound to ~3H inductance and would give a Jazzmaster-like resonance peak. Of the options I just named, the first two would likely end up around 8-9k resistance if you used 42 or 43 AWG for the main coil. In fact, you could just straight up pop one magnet out of a Thunderbird and have a noiseless pickup with a ballpark vintage Fender voice that fits into a JM cover.

That actually sounds like a fun hypothesis to test. There are these, which are relatively cheap, so it might be a fun experiment to see how those would sound with one bobbin converted to a dummy coil.

Some day, I swear I'm going to find the time to build a pickup winder and start doing experiments myself.

I have been hoping for Lawing Musica to create a Jazzmaster pickup but I don't think there will be one anytime soon. They seem to use a different way to achieve a hum-free pickup and from what I have read they are extremely good. I contacted them a year or so ago about getting a Jazzmaster one and due to low demand, they are not planing on doing it for now.

[Larry Mal]

Do you know if regular Jazzmaster pickup covers fit them?

I didn't try other covers, but I certainly would imagine so: