NGD! MIJJMJM

[pikmin]

All I know is Georgia Maq from Camp Cope uses one of these and sounds great.

Modified with neck pickup wired direct to output jack apparently.

Yey ! I love Camp Cope too !

I saw them Last year In Belgium, it was awesome . On tour in the US and in Europe , she played on a Squier JMJM but I think she changed the pickups ...

[The Dead Ranch Hands]

Nah, that bad boy hasn't been out long enough for me to find one in the wild yet.

This one is in a certain way a younger cousin of my '62 refin Jag...

Oh man, that's gorgeous!

[Liquitone]

For sure, the finish is spectacular on it.

I've always "kinda" wanted one of these. I love how crazy the aesthetics are, but my problem is that I'm actually a J Mascis fan. I've never liked artist signature models because I'm not into the weird celebrity worship aspect of that kind of thing. I once bought a TVL JM because I freaking loved the finish on it, but felt weird playing a signature guitar so I ended up selling it. I feel like I can't play anything remotely Mascis-sounding on this guitar without seeming...lame.

These are pretty uncommon though, especially in Canada, so I'll have to see how I feel about it after a while. First order of business will be a setup, as it has some grungy flatwounds on it and the intonation is approaching microtonal on the A string up the neck, but the neck feels nice and it's definitely a looker. I've never heard one of these in person before so I'll have to see what I think of the pickups. The current strings definitely aren't doing them any favours, so I'll fix that this weekend when I have time to set it up.

Hey, if Lou Barlow can get away with it without seeming lame, so can you!

[sunburster]

I'm pretty sure the Japanese Mascis has regular ole' Fender Japan JM pickups. I could be remembering that wrong though. A quick peak under the pickup covers will solve the mystery!

BTW if it is a CIJ Mascis it has a basswood body. If it is a MIJ Mascis it has an alder body.

[Larry Mal]

I'm pretty sure the Japanese Mascis has regular ole' Fender Japan JM pickups. I could be remembering that wrong though. A quick peak under the pickup covers will solve the mystery!

BTW if it is a CIJ Mascis it has a basswood body. If it is a MIJ Mascis it has an alder body.

I'm starting to think that I was wrong and that they will have whatever "regular" Japanese Jazzmaster pickups are. I say "regular" because I had always been told that there were Strat type pickups under my Jazzmaster covers on my early 90's MIJ but they weren't, they were shaped exactly like Jazzmaster pickups.

I still pulled them out, though.

My MIJ Jazzmaster has basswood- I think it's wonderful.

So I guess that those super cool pickups I had were from the Squier J Mascis guitars... no wonder people rave about those things.

[Danley]

‘Strat pickups under Jazzmaster covers’ is an exaggeration. The standard and MIJ bobbins share the same footprint, but the coil itself is thicker on MIJ, while not as wide - so the winding approximates a Strat pickup more than vintage Jazzmaster. I think Fender’s modern 'V-Mod' pickups or whatever are like that too.

[sunburster]

My MIJ Jazzmaster has basswood- I think it's wonderful.

The Mascis JM is unusual because the CIJ version, which was made in 2005-2008 or so, had a basswood body at a time when other JP JMs had alder bodies. When they switched back to MIJ in 2008, the Mascis started being made with an alder body.

[Embenny]

Oh cool, I didn't even realize there were CIJ vs MIJ JMJMs, or that the woods differed. This is fortunately an MIJ, so I guess that means I got alder instead of basswood.

I got it set up today, and it's playing great! I also got to examine the pickups and guess what I found?

This is the JMJM pickup on the left, and a Vintage Vibe Jazzmaster pickup on the right.


Yep. It's the dreaded MIJ "strat pickup" wind.

Here is it next to a Squier VM Jaguar pickup.


So, it's shorter and a little wider than a Jaguar pickup's coil, but way taller and way narrower than a JM.

Here are all three showing the height difference.



More importantly, with new strings and a proper setup, I got to plug it in and...man. It really does sound like a strat. A thin one. Absolutely nothing like a Jazzmaster. It actually sounds thinner and spankier than my '65 Mustang. My rig is set up for a fair variety of guitars from my mustang through several humbucker guitars, and it sounded downright screechy in a way none of my other guitars do. My wife came by to see the new guitar in action. After a few minutes I stopped playing and said, "Yeah, these are Japanese Jazzmaster pickups...they're kind of known for being bad," and this look of relief washed over her face. She said, "Oh, good, so you don't think it sounds good either. I've never heard that amp sound awful like this."

So, if I do keep it, it'll definitely be getting a new set of pickups. I have several JM pickups in the parts drawer and frankly any of them in any permutation would be an improvement, so it's not like this situation couldn't be remedied easily enough.

I'll give it a bit of time. Maybe I'll get my amp dialed in to a place where the guitar sounds better. I mean, the neck pickup is stratty and strat neck pickups are one of my favourite guitar tones, so that shouldn't be too hard. But the middle and bridge positions just have a real upper mid ice pick effect that is pretty obnoxious.

I've never been put off by bad pickups, though, since they're so easily changed. The guitar looks great and it's playing/feeling great now, too. The D profile and jumbo frets are surprisingly comfortable and I didn't have any tuning issues with moderate vibrato use despite the silly TOM bridge. Overall, it's a nice guitar.

[postchrist]

All I know is Georgia Maq from Camp Cope uses one of these and sounds great.

Modified with neck pickup wired direct to output jack apparently.

Yey ! I love Camp Cope too !

I saw them Last year In Belgium, it was awesome . On tour in the US and in Europe , she played on a Squier JMJM but I think she changed the pickups ...

woah hey same!! camp cope is incredible!

[Larry Mal]

Yeah, crazy, my early 90s MIJ Jazzmaster's pickups did not look like those ones there. Those really do look like Strat pickups at a quick glance.

You shielded your Jazzmaster pickups! Did you find that helped much?

[Embenny]

Yeah, crazy, my early 90s MIJ Jazzmaster's pickups did not look like those ones there. Those really do look like Strat pickups at a quick glance.

You shielded your Jazzmaster pickups! Did you find that helped much?

That's actually the Vintage Vibe Jazzmaster Pickup from my Warmoth JM, which comes shielded stock.

It's a funny thing...those were the first pickups I ever used, in my first Jazzmaster I ever owned, and by the time I acquired another one, I was already using the Kemper which has bizarrely effective noise gate or algorithm or something - I can use my vintage Fenders with massive, fuzzed out gain and virtually never notice intrusive noise. So I don't feel that I'm as intimately familiar with Jazzmaster noise levels.

But, I can say that, in the years I was using it with tube amps, the Vintage Vibe JM pickups never struck me as being any noisier than my Jaguar, which come to think of it, also spent most of its lifespan with Vintage Vibe JG90 pickups which also came shielded as stock.

So I suppose it must have helped. I actually had both pickups wound with the same polarity, and had Pete wind a dummy coil to cancel noise with both, but I ended up disconnecting it since I didn't find it to be all that beneficial when engaged and disliked the tonal impact it had. So clearly the stock shielding job must have been doing a fair bit, or I wouldn't have been so happy with those pickups for so long.

I did just recently pull them out, mostly for the sake of trying something new, but I had those pickups in there for over a decade and was very happy with them. I don't know why other winders don't just shield all single coils the way Pete does.

[Larry Mal]

Yeah, I gotta get around to shielding my Jazzmaster pickups I guess.

Anyway, this is what I pulled from my old MIJ Jazzmaster:



The old pickup is on the left. Been a long time since I thought about it at all, but as you can see it isn't wound very high or anything. Looks pretty lightly wound to me, though.

I replaced them with "real" Jazzmaster vintage wind pickups, and they sound good, but had I known I was going to turn around and buy another Jazzmaster down the road I would have kept this one stock. It was thin and buzzy but had a sound all its own, and it would feedback like crazy.

I will probably get some noiseless Jazzmaster pickups for something or other some day, though. We'll see how these new Ultra pickups are.

[Danley]

What year was your Jazzmaster, Larry? Those do look sparse; I heard at one point some newer Japanese models wound up with US pickups but didn’t really pay attention. Those don’t look US either, whatever they’re from.

The pickups on my ‘96 MIJ Jaguar were incredibly loose and microphonic, the windings would basically rattle on the bobbin. They didn’t sound *bad* but...

[Larry Mal]

If I remember correctly my Jazzmaster MIJ is from '93 thereabouts.

I am not the original owner and I suppose it's possible that someone else replaced the pickups, but I really doubt it, nothing else was changed at all. And I bought it very quickly after it had been made, whoever owned it only had it for six months at the longest.

I never knew what to think, everything I had heard about Jazzmaster pickups from that era of Japanese manufacture didn't seem to correspond with what I had. They certainly were not very good pickups, though.

That era of Japanese Jazzmasters is not strong in my opinion, other than the excellent playability on them. The body and neck is great, but the hardware was cheap, the electronics worse, the pickups pretty bad, and the guitar didn't have a lick of shielding to it of any kind.

But man, I love that guitar. It would be the last one I would ever part with.

[Danley]

Weird - my 96 (Jaguar admittedly) has all the brass shielding, but my later 2000s CIJ did not. I think cheap hardware is a gimme on most MIJ and CIJ guitars I laid hands on- have a US bridge and trem on mine, as well as a total rewire and new pickups. It’s worse with the Jaguars, where you have even more cheap/thin chrome (really evident if you swap on an AVRI trem with the luscious, oily looking thick chrome.)

Iirc the Japanese catalogs specify alder for all Jazzmasters except special finishes. No clue how accurate they are, but ‘91 is the last year they admit to any basswood. I’m sure the change wasn’t immediate or total:

1993 - http://brochures.yokochou.com/guitar-an ... en_07.html

1991 - http://brochures.yokochou.com/guitar-an ... en_06.html