mbene085 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 5:11 pmYou could say I'm a fan of Firebirds in HH Jaguars. It's a small club, but we have a few members here on the board. I think they're a natural pairing.
I've had Firebirds in four different Offsets, and they sounded the best in the hardtail Jags, hands down. Thinking about it, I guess the warmth of the short scale and the longer sustain/lower emphasis on attack from the hardtail make the HH Jags more similar to the actual Firebird they were designed for than, say, a Jazzmaster or a Jag or Mustang with a vibrato. They sound good in anything, but they just sound the best to me in Jaguars (or actual Firebirds).
FYI, if you want to keep the HH look and/or reuse the pickguard, the pickups in my gunmetal blue Jag are called Big Birds, from D'Urbano Magnetics/Mr. Fabulous in Australia. They've got PAF-sized bobbins with PAF-sized bar magnets in them, but are constructed in the same manner as Firebirds. They're basically the WRHBs of the Firebird world. Physically bigger and bigger-sounding with more low end than a vintage Firebird, but the same characteristic clarity and attack.
I had Fab wind mine with asymmetric bobbins (one coil with 43g wire and A5, one coil with 44g wire and A5 degaussed to A2 strength), and wired to Duncan Triple Shot rings. Each coil is roughly analogous to a strat-sized lipstick tube pickup (big bar magnet, low inductance, significant eddy currents from a full metal cover), so it gets all sorts of Danelectro-like tones as well. You could just get a standard/symmetrical wind and a simple coil split to similar effect, too, if you don't need the fifteen million combinations. I wanted to try it "for science" and there's definitely a difference between each position, but realistically a single split tone per pickup would be more than enough to add variety and make a great pair of pickups even better.
Of course, I'll never argue against getting Curtis to wind you up some Firebirds if that's the direction you're leaning. I've had three sets of his pickups over the years and they've all been great. I wouldn't bother coil splitting a vintage Firebird, that'd be too thin a tone, so I leave my standard Firebirds wired in series as nature intended.
PS, how long until this one is sporting some stickers?
Curtis Novak's site seems to be down for some reason - lots of Forbidden errors over the weekend. I'm going to go ahead and buy a set of the D'Ubano Magnetics Firebird set from Mr. Fabulous off of Reverb. Would you recommend ALNICO 2 or ALNICO 5? I'm fairly clueless about ALNICO differences.
I'm guessing the P90 routs in the pickguard will be too large for the Firebird set (could be wrong, usually am ). Since I'm getting 2 pickguards (stock mint green and the white one), I'll likely send off the white one to Pickguardian to have one made to properly fit the Firebird set.
Any recommendations on pickguard color with the Burgundy Mist (my first Burgundy Mist ever! )? Black? Tort? Mint? Something else?