Description
Surf’s up. This is our vintage spec Jaguar® pickup. Classic Jaguar bite and spank and available with white, cream or black covers. Wound with heavy Formvar 42 AWG wire, these are reverse polarity, reverse wound for hum cancelling in the middle position and have non staggered Alnico V slugs. Vintage cloth coloured wire and black wax potted. Includes chrome plated steel claw.
Jarrod (verified owner) –
A few weeks ago I put these into my ’93 MIJ JG-66 Jaguar as part of reviving that guitar as the original electronics were never very good but had also developed a number of problems: reduced output, scratchy pots, constant noise, wonky switches. So I gutted it, redid the wiring with cloth wire and reverted it to the original 1meg pots (previous owner had modded it with mismatched 500k and 250k pots).
First off, these are definitely ’65 style jag pickups with Alnico V slugs – they’re brighter and a little higher output than a ’62 Alnico II jag pickup. However, I’ve found them to not be icepick-y in the way a lot of jag pickups can be while keep the rest of the characteristics a ’65 pickup intact.
Originally the stock MIJ pickups I had were shrill and quite harsh, particularly in the bridge so I basically never used anything other than the neck position, and I half expected that to remain the case or even get worse with 1meg pots (I wanted to keep it vintage spec’d anyway). But somehow the JAG-V in the bridge is actually kind of sweet sounding even with the 1meg, all that shrillness is gone from the top end but it’s still got that classic jaguar brightness, clarity, and a little bit of spank. To my ears it’s also a bit fuller and not as thin as a lot of other Jag bridge pickups I’ve heard. Pair it with round-core nickel strings and you can even dial back the top end a tad more.
The good doesn’t stop there either, I shield all my guitars with copper shielding but even then I was still surprised by how quiet these are. These are by far the quietest single coils I’ve ever played. Granted they’re not high output or anything, they’re the sort of standard Fender-y single coil 6.8k, and this particular Jag has the vintage style brass ground plates in the cavities, but even then I’m running through a Marshall Super-Lead style amp at fairly moderate gain and I’m getting not all that much noise or hum.
The neck is nice and full sounding while not being dark or muddy, and I’ve even found the rhythm circuit a bit more useable now for getting a darker neck tone that’s similar to a Strat neck position with the tone rolled off, it doesn’t have that horrible wooly and muddy sound that the rhythm circuit usually has.
Honestly beautiful pickups, cannot recommend these enough if you’re looking for a vintage sounding Jag pickup, Michael does great work and is incredibly helpful with inquiries. They’re well priced too, especially in comparison with both other boutique builders and even Fenders own extremely limited jag pickup options.