I've got a '62 Jag in a blue sparkle refin whose pickups were rewound by Jason Lollar, so I decided that I don't feel guilty about disturbing solder joints or replacing pickups since those two things have essentially happened already. I've been obsessed with noiseless pickups for some time and have been systematically replacing pickups and/or entire guitars to eliminate noise. I just wasn't playing this incredible vintage Jag nearly enough when my cheaper guitars sounded great and were noiseless, so I decided to do something about that.
They're literally the only Jaguar-format noiseless pickups on the market. Many noiseless strat pickups are made without the triangle baseplate and can fit in a Jaguar, but they don't have the square cover and claw and leave big gaps around the pickup unless you get a guard cut for them. If you want something traditional-looking for a Jag, Kinman is the only option, and I definitely didn't want to go so far as to stick strat-looking pickups in a vintage Jag.
So, I went ahead and ordered a set.
I've had very limited play time on them, but here are my thoughts on the process so far.
Choosing the pickups
Kinman has many virtues, but clarity of differences between pickup models is not one of them. There are three models, called "Surf Jag," "Blues Jag," and "Punk Jag." They're quite terribly named, since there are no famous blues tones to emulate with a Jag, nor are there famous punk guitarists whose tone those would be emulating. With some digging, this is what I learned.
Surf Jag: This is just the Impersonator E56 Strat pickup in Jaguar form factor. The E56 is the third-lowest output strat pickup Kinman makes, and is the "low output 50's tone" pickup in their Strat lineup.
Blues Jag: This is the Impersonator E54 Strat pickup in Jaguar form factor. The E54 is one step up in output from the E56 and is just a little bit softer around the edges, being the "fat 50's" type pickup in their Strat lineup.
Punk Jag: This is the Texas Jalapeno strat pickup in Jaguar form factor. The T.J. is itself very stupidly named and long story short, is the highest output Strat pickup that they make that is advertised as sounding truly like a Strat - the only higher-output ones are the Big Nine-O which aims for "P90-in-a-strat" tone and the Kick In The Arse which aims for "PAF-in-a-Strat" tones. The T.J. is also a new name for the fifth iteration of a differently-named model that has been eliminated from the Kinman lineup (the "Fat 50"), so you more or less can't find any demos online. It seems that, despite being high output, it doesn't sound like an overwound pickup. Certainly the one or two demos I could find lacked the overblown midrange and blunted treble I associate with high-output strat pickups.
I have '62 and '65 Jags, with the '62 being darker and fuller and the '65 being thinner and brighter, as you'd expect from flat-poled '62 black bobbins vs staggered grey bobbin Jag pickups. I figured I'd try the Blues Jag for this guitar, since I wanted to buy a second set for the '65 if I liked them, so I figured I could go a step down to the Surf Jag for that one to maintain the traditional difference between them, or put these in the '65 and step up to the Punk Jag if they turned out to be too thin.
Kinman recommends 250k pots, but that didn't seem to be design-related. After all, vintage Jaguar pickups were wound much the same as vintage Strat pickups, and everyone would tell you to use 250k for those, but the exaggerated resonant peak of the 1M pots is part of the whole Jaguar "thing" IMO, so I decided to start there (plus, I wanted to leave the vintage harness in place - if it comes to swapping pots, I'll be lifting the whole thing out and putting in a new one, so this seemed like the logical place to start).
Installation
This wasn't clear to me from the Kinman site before ordering, but was mentioned in the documentation it came with - the covers Kinman provides are 1mm wider than stock, and won't fit in a pickguard until you file 0.5mm away from the round ends of each pickup rout. Fortunately, I was already using replacement guards on this guitar. No way in hell I'd be filing a vintage celluloid guard to fit Kinmans, so beware of that.
The pickup covers are replaceable, but you have to be wary of pole spacing. Kinman offers multiple, slightly altered pole spaces to line up ideally in the neck and bridge with the different bridge options (e.g. 55mm Mustsang bridges vs 52mm Staytrems ), so you need to remember what you ordered or choose standard spacing if you want an easy swap. There's also an interesting mechanism on the pickups where two metal tines on each side are pressure-fit into the cover and need to be bent in order to remove one and then bent back after replacing the new one. Kinman says this is to prevent microphonic feedback, and it's certainly a cool way to immobilize a cover, but you need to know that it's there or else you'll mess up your cover and/or pickup trying to change it.
All in all, I'd probably have made sure to order standard pole spacing if I knew the Kinman covers were slightly too wide, and just thrown a pair of my own on it when it arrived, so please do so if you have a vintage guitar or a nice guard you don't want to have to modify.
I decided to use this B/W/B guard I had around because I wanted to try something new anyway, and it was like $10 from EY guitars so I didn't mind experimenting with it in terms of fit. The vintage blue sparkle Jags had black guards so it seemed like a good fit, although I ordered my pickups with black covers instead of vintage-accurate white because I thought that'd coordinate better. A bit of sandpaper wrapped around a dowel got the round ends filed sufficiently in just a few minutes. Mildly annoying and preventable by just providing vintage-sized covers, but not the end of the world on a modern guard.
Another fun discovery was that the pickups are slightly taller than the vintage ones. This wouldn't have been an issue, except my Jag has about a 1/4" thickness of original foam that has melted into some sort of toxic goo beneath each pickup, and there are vintage cloth-covered wires that are embedded in the stuff beneath the neck pickup as they run between the lead and rhythm circuit. I didn't want to be scraping out the original foam and risking damaging the original wires, so I was forced to install the pickups on top of all that. What that meant was shimming my guitar by about a degree. Not the end of the world, but the setup was really dialed in on the guitar and I may or may not have been uttering cursewords as I had to pop off my neck and readjust the bridge for what was supposed to be a simple, 2-solder-joint pickup swap. I was already salty from my discovery that I had to sand the pickguard, because I started this all on a break from packing my house and didn't want to be dealing with so many extra steps.
Oh well. None of these were insurmountable obstacles, they were just annoying. Almost as annoying as finishing the whole installation and setup, stringing the guitar up, and discovering that I had managed to forget the vintage pickup shield sitting on my workbench. Sigh. Had to disassemble the whole thing to put that back on there.
Plugging it in
These were my first Kinman pickups. I listened to every Youtube clip out there, talked to OSGers like Larry who was kind enough to record some comparison clips of his Kinman JM pickups and send me the Logic files to play around with, and finally bit the bullet on these expensive pickups from the guy with the weird-ass website and the noiseless design with a large number of patents and a number of devoted fans.
After all that, I plugged it in...and it sounds like a vintage Jaguar, but noiseless. I strung it up with Elixirs which are insufferably bright for the first few hours after you put them on, and it certainly sounds a lot brighter than it did before the pickup swap, but the last time I played it was with old strings so that's not a fair comparison.
I did a quick A/B with my '65 Jag and the '62 with the Blues Jag pickups and fresh Elixirs is significantly brighter than the '65 Jag with vintage pickups and old strings. Again, not a great comparison, but it confirmed at least one thing - these Kinmans do the "single coil Jag" thing amazingly well. The spank, they sparkle, they don't sound in any way shape or form like some sort of compromise in "single-coil-ness" for the sake of losing the noise.
If anything, they do it too well, and might indeed benefit from dropping the pots to 250k. I'm rolling back the tone knob to 5-7 to get it to where the guitar was before the swap - but, again, this is with fresh Elixirs, and I haven't had time to play with pickup height either. I need to get 6-8 hours of playtime onto them before I can really judge, and see what range of pickup heights is permitted by my gunky-foam-lined pickup routs. I always find these strings to be unflattering and harsh when fresh, but I have a bunch of guitars and I like that I can get 6+ months of life out of those strings once they break in. It lets me cut down on restringing time (plus I always feel guilty about the waste generated by frequent string changes, since there are no ways to recycle them that I've found here in Canada).
So there you have it. As far as I can tell, this is the first ever firsthand confirmation that Kinman Jaguar pickups sound like true single coils.
I'm going to get to know these for a little while, and then decide whether to step down in output to the Surf Jags for my '65, or step up to the Punk Jags. I was initially worried that the Punk Jags would be a hot, midrangey mess unfit for a vintage Jaguar, but with the high end clarity and sharp pick attack coming out of these Blues Jag pickups, they could easily be named "Sparkle-Surf Jag" or something IMO. As an owner and lover of a '65 Mustang and '65 Jaguar I find myself wondering how anybody could ask for more vintage-style treble out of a pickup than these pickups possess.
