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Then do i have the fix for you ! If you recall from my other thread, i have a squier paranormal tele that has those pickups that are more P90 than JM due to screw poles and bar mag. But they are in jazzmaster shells. I posted about trying to make the pickups work and talked about having first tried a set of fender pure vintage 65 jazzmasters in it and hated them. I have heard the same from a fair number of people since this, my first foray into anything close to jazzmaster territory. So i started modding the remaining stock pickup after one died and found a way to make them sound better. Not great but better, and i ordered a pair since they are cheap chinese pickups u can get for $25 on ebay and are the same as it came with.

Anyways, cut to the chase....i thought about trying to somehow mount other pickups in it but tele pickup polepieces don't match the jazzmaster cover oles. Today i check my strat pickups and they fit. So i thought about how i could go about mounting them and it hit me....simple, just leave the foam i have in the cavity (i removed the rubber foam off the stock pickups and put spongy foam in the cavity to allow lower settings) ans put the strat pickup in the cover and hold it in while i put it in the cavity with the springs and screws in place. That was all there was to it ! No fabricating anything and they just drop in !

The results were fantastic. SOOOOOO much better then the fender 65's or the modded stock ones. I tried any old strat i had loose in the parts drawer and just did the bridge. But now i think i may take my best set and use 2 of those and not even bother with the stock units i ordered from china. Now i wish i hadn't ! But for anyone who can't seem to make their JM type pickups work for them because they just find them too scooped and bright, heres a great and simple answer if you have any strat pickups laying around. I'm going to put the bridge and neck pickups from my fender fat 50s set in it later on tonite. This allowed me to truly hear whether i like this guitar or not because it was hard to tell thru the sound of those fake JMs or the 65s both of which are not to my taste. The stock once might have been if they sounded like P90s which is what they are closest to, but they don't.

This is actually a super cool idea! Thanks for sharing, I know someone who may be really interested in this.

The let me give you a bit of advice to pass to him to make it easier. What i did is to cut 2 pieces of foam like the kind they use in pickup packaging. Cut each one so it's about a 1/2" thick and maybe 3/4" wide, and for length it should fit the width of the cavity so that each piece sits up against the cutouts for the cover screws. Or i suppose you could use a piece the entire size of the cavity but the thickness may have to be less or it may be too compressed to lower the pickup as much as he may want. In any case what i'm getting at that will make install much easier it that the cutouts should have foam up against them so you can put the springs in the cutouts and the foam will hold them in place as you lower the pickup in. Otherwise they will fall over and make installing the cover with the pickup a PITA. So once the foam is in and springs sitting in the cutouts, have the screws in the cover then push the pickup in so the poles line up and push them thru the holes hold it in place with one hand and use the other to feed the wires thru. Once u pull the wires thru, while holding the pickup in the cover, lower the pickup in and guide the screws into the springs and push and hold the whole thing down and with the other hand screw it down.Anyways, probably way more then he needs and can figure it out himself, but the main point is using the foam not only to push against the pickup keeping it in place, but to hold the springs in place while you lower the whole shebang in place

Cool, I did a simelar thing with my first parts Jazzmaster some 15 years ago. I didn't have pick ups, so I put a Strat Middle and Bridge pick up in this guitar and put some Jazzmaster covers over the strat pu's. I later did a simelar thing with a pair of Gretch mini himbuckers where I removed the covers from, put them in a DIY thinline Jazzmaster with std. Jm pu covers.
like you wrote, if the pole pieces match the holes of the Jm covers, you can put about everything under these covers and put some foam underneath the pick ups to level them out.

I think a formite here still owns the thinline Jm with the Gretch mini's...

A while back I was planning on doing a pair of Alnico 2 strat pick ups in a Frankenmaster, but then I found a used set of Creamery '58 style alnoco 2 pickups and got these.

But, yeah... a pair of good strat pick ups in a Jazzmaster sound pretty good. Plenty of choiche as well....
You might even want to consider putting a middle strat pu in between.

Japanese Jazzmasters have traditionally had Strat pickups beneath Jazzmaster covers.

Lost In Autumn wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 08, 2021 5:18 am

Japanese Jazzmasters have traditionally had Strat pickups beneath Jazzmaster covers.

No. They're Jazzmaster pickups, they just have a slightly different wind and bobbin height which makes them sound a bit more like Strat pickups.
Here's what MIJ JM pickups look like:

One of these days, I might actually build something around the pickups out of my '94 MIJ JM. The only thing that's really wrong with them is that they're not traditional JM pickups. They have a thing of their own that's probably exploitable.

Sweetfinger wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 10, 2021 3:53 am

Lost In Autumn wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 08, 2021 5:18 am

Japanese Jazzmasters have traditionally had Strat pickups beneath Jazzmaster covers.

No. They're Jazzmaster pickups, they just have a slightly different wind and bobbin height which makes them sound a bit more like Strat pickups.
Here's what MIJ JM pickups look like:

their taller bobbin effectively makes them strat pickups, that the bobbin looks like a Jazzmaster from the top is irrelevant.

.

This is the camera angle you need for the MIJ JM pickup comparison...
Still not quite a Strat pickup.