TheScottMaple wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2024 12:33 pm
Nice.
I wasn’t sure about going for a hotrails style because although there are the benefits of noise reduction, greater sustain and of course RAWK they’re taller than standard pickups and the Mustangs have thinner bodies and (correct me if I’m wrong) or the deepest of pickup routes.
I’ve found that hot pickups too close to the strings can sound too choked for my tastes.
Difficult to know without trying though.
Well I remember
I watched this video for a comparison - not that I was going for Nirvana tone at all, just no-one had really done something like that in a Jag. As someone who's owned several Mustangs and knows roughly how they tend to sound, I used that as a reference point. Neither the JB or the JB Jr. in the video seemed to have the clarity in the mids that I wanted, so the Hot Rails, which I never would have considered otherwise, won pretty easily.
Noise reduction, greater sustain (partly due to pickup compression - these things are 16.6K DC which ranks them as hot to super hot depending on who you ask) and better performance when driven, especially higher gain as you might want for hard rock, grunge and metal.
I don't think pickup height would be a problem because Jag uses pickups in body like a Mustang rather than pickups on guard like a Strat and I seem to remember shimming the pickup a bit on top of the rubber/foam in the route so it sat a little higher. They're really not that much taller than the stock single coils that were in there, and they're basically a sealed unit so pretty easy to work with. Just have to mess around a bit running the wire through the pickup route because obviously they were designed for Strats so it can be a tight fit, but as it's worked flawlessly for 5 years with the wire tucked and running parallel to the pickup I'm not worried. I guess those pickup claws were good for something - they mean the pickup route has to be bigger, so when you remove them you get that space back for other things!
With hotter pickups, yes the cleans will suffer a little because hotter pickups tend to emphasise the midrange above all else (also but not always the bass response), so brightness takes a hit. An amp with a good presence/treble controls which have a wide sweep can sort this out though, to an extent, but really it has to be the sort of guitar you mostly want to play with gain, even if it's just bluesy breakup.
Jag here with my friend's Tele and my own Meteora, which is my "low gain pickup" guitar for slightly better cleans, both humbucking and coil split (first guitar I've come across where the coil tap sounds amazing, if you don't mind boosting the output a little with a clean boost pedal that is).
2003 CIJ Fender Jaguar, sunburst (SJAG-3n neck, SHR-1b bridge, 500K lead circuit pots/speed knobs, Mastery bridge, Buzz Stop, Squier JM JM vibrato plate, modified whammy bar)
2022 MIM Fender Meteora, cosmic jade (top mounted input jack added)
plus to be honest it just feels really nice to use. Strat style gives you more range at the expense of tuning stability of the other strings when bending one or two strings, you kind of just have to deal with it and adapt your playing technique to suit I suppose.