I've always loved short scale guitars, as my favorite couch guitar is a 1960 Musicmaster, so I thought I'd like to try another short scale with a bridge pickup, and that brought me to the idea of a Jaguar. I was intrigued by the wiring setup on a Jag with it's separate rhythm circuit. Having three different neck pickup sounds at the flick of two switches sounded cool to me (rhythm circuit, lead circuit, lead circuit with strangle switch).
The few vintage Jags that I played years ago were setup badly, so my first impressions weren't good, but lately the popularity of offsets has taken off, so I wondered if there was some new hardware available to make them play better, or were people just learning how to set them up better.
So the search began and I started by reading every online article I found about Jaguars, and I watched every online setup video that I could find on youtube! A lot of tips came from this forum and many articles linked back this way!
Time to test the waters, so I bought a Jaguar...
1) I started with a Classic Vibe 70's block neck Jaguar. I found one with a poplar body, in Daphne Blue, and only 8.2 lbs (some custom shop Jags weigh more than this). More than once, I've read that poplar, although kind of ugly in it's natural state, was a pretty good tone wood. So what the hell, I took a chance. When I got it, it was setup terribly, strings would pop out of the bridge, the fingerboard and frets were terribly finished, the nut was slotted and finished badly, and the tremolo made ridiculously bad mechanical noise. But this guitar was ridiculously low priced, and all of these problems were fixed very easily after watching this video...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BafuV4jWt9c&t=1195s
I did everything he did in this video, neck shims, hammer trick on the trem arm, filed the contact points on the trem, loctite on everything that could move, etc. And after all this setup work, it was great playing and very good sounding guitar!'
2) But I wanted a locking trem, so I bought and installed a Japanese AVRI locking tremolo. Setting it up was helped by this...
https://offset.guitars/the-goodies/sett ... lo-system/
Here's a pic after that install...
3) So I was thinking to myself, I wish this was a dot neck, and I don't really like binding so....
I found a cool Classic Player Lacquer 7.25 radius unbound dot neck, and it had a really cool looking stripe running down it's Pao Ferro fingerboard. Some people don't like Pao Ferro, but I've loved Pao Ferro fingerboards ever since I tried the first one on my Custom Shop Tele Jr, and it's on one of my Zemaitis metal tops. I love the way it feels like ebony, but looks like rosewood! The fretwork and finish work on this neck was GREAT!!! And the neck came with a pre-slotted nut, which I f'd up, so I bought a Tusc nut blank and a Tusc string retainer, and went to work...
I also changed the bridge to something I could adjust for the new 7.25 radius of the neck...
At this stage, this is what it looked like...
and a close up of the stripe...
4) Okay I was starting to really like this guitar, and I noticed it had a really great neck pickup tone, but the bridge pickup tone was a little weak, so I thought let's find some pickups, and while I'm at it let's swap out all the cheap Squire wiring to all switchcraft, CTS, and good pushback wire! The pickups I used were wound by EP Custom that I found on Instagram and Reverb.
https://www.instagram.com/epcustompickups/?hl=en
https://reverb.com/item/36479833-ep-cus ... nd-formvar
They are wound to 6.3K neck, 6.9K bridge, and were lightly potted as a unit, pickups/cover/claw!
And a very good friend had some American control plates and a parchment color pickguard that he gave me, so I got to wiring it up...
and buttoned up...
All I really needed was the right strap, which I found, and now I'm in business, and the only thing left from the original Classic Vibe is the body, the strap pins, and the tuners. Although I did a lot of parts swapping this thing sounds killer, and plays fantastic, with an extremely comfortable low action. And it cost me less than a Vintera Jag, and I would be willing to bet this one sounds and is setup better than one of those! I put a lot of work into it to get it there!
