Is there a jazzmaster pickup set that comes (really) close to the ‘strat’ neck pickup sound..

[BornToHula]

Yes I know the jazzmaster is not a strat and its has its own unique thing, vibe and sound. Both to be honest I just love the ‘strat sound’ and since i’m building a jazzmaster I was wondering can i get close with just pickups. I don’t want to use ‘real’ strat pups cause I want to keep the looks authentic. I hear the v-mods get close?

Any thoughts or tips?

[MayTheFuzzBeWithYou]

V-mods and Japanese JM pickups came to my mind - but surely there are some more specifics out there... but couldn‘t you (hypothetically) even put actual Strat pickups under the JM covers?

[andy_tchp]

but couldn‘t you (hypothetically) even put actual Strat pickups under the JM covers?

Yes.

And it still won't sound 'like a Strat'.

[Veitchy]

As stated above, any of the 'Strat-in-a-JM-cover) options will be the closest.

What you'll miss from a Strat is going to be down to the placement of the pickups themselves - even for the same scale length the pickups are going to be in slightly different positions to each other and you'd be surprised at the difference this makes. I don't have both the guitars at my disposal at the moment to check the different spacing, but someone here may. The different bridges and the way the strings are anchored also contribute.

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As a side note, I personally think that part of a Strat's soud is having the pickups placed close to each other, and the potentially overlapping magnetic fields of the pickups, though I have no firm basis to prove (or disprove) that at this time.

[alexpigment]

I actually have a strat neck pickup and tele bridge pickup under my JM covers. True, it doesn't get 100% stratty due to placement and other factors, but it's close enough that it's recognizable as a strat neck pickup.

Also, I know there are JM pickup purists out there who love the neck pickup sound, but I appreciate the relative thinness of the strat neck pickup. It makes switching between bridge and neck a lot easier without re-EQing.

[timtam]

If you put a strat pickup in the exact same location it would be on a strat you might get close. While the contributors to the sonic pallet are reasonably well understood (see Zollner breakdown below for example), we obviously don't have an easy way to attribute proportions, eg we can't say "This is the frequency spectrum of a typical strat and this is for a typical jazzmaster. 60% is common to both; 40% is different. Of that difference, 50% is due to the pickups, 30% to their placement, 10% to the bridge absorbances, and 10% to the pots' pickup loading (250k vs 1meg)."
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/T ... e14939c004

[BornToHula]

Thanks for al the response and info guys. Its clear that the positions of the neck pickup (closer to the neck) have a lot to do with its unique sound.

For now. The V-mods is gonna be my choice.