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So I've been having some wrist issues lately directly related to playing guitar. I'm wearing a brace for a while longer, stretching, icing, the whole thing. My acoustic is 25.5" scale and after borrowing a MIJ Mustang from smallsound/briansound, I'm hopeful that playing a short scale guitar will help get me back on track (along with better technique obviously). So I've been on the hunt for Mustangs and Jaguars and this popped up on my local craigslist. Aesthetically, it's practically my dream guitar. I love dark wood stains and the offset shape, so I was drooling over this at first sight. I emailed the dude immediately, and again later that day, and the day after, but didn't hear anything. I was bummed and convinced he had sold it already and just wasn't getting back to me, so I kept searching. Fast forward a few days and he still has it so I snatched it up.

Specs:

MIJ Jaguar body, stripped and finished with a walnut stain
Allparts Jaguar neck finished in gun oil, 7.25" radius
Duncan pickups, vintage in the neck & hot in the bridge
AVRI hardware & a mustang bridge
Stock wiring

built by: http://totallywiredguitars.net/


The body is fairly light and 4 pieces, so I would suspect it's made of basswood. The finish is suuuuper thin and I'm pretty sure no clear coat was applied. I can run my fingernail along the body and leave a scratch. This might have to be redone in the future? But at the moment I'm diggin how it's worn. The neck profile is wonderful. It's way thicker than the aforementioned MIJ Mustang but not quite a baseball bat. Allparts website says it measures .85" at the first fret. The pickups sound really good as well. The neck pickup seems to give me pretty much everything I'd want on my initial impression, and the bridge pickup is surprisingly rad. I usually hate bridge pickup sounds but this one seems pretty balanced, enough low end for a single coil but not super quacky. The vibrato and bridge are set up really well. There is some kind of thin rubber (a balloon perhaps?) sticking out of the bridge thimble holes and it's in there nice and snug. The vibrato arm stays right where you put it and there's no play whatsoever, if I move the arm even a tiny bit the pitch moves right along with it. I'll probably get a shorter arm for this eventually. The pick guard doesn't line up with the control plates super well, a few of the screws are drilled in at an angle, and the vibrato might be installed a teeny tiny bit at an angle, but these are all pretty minor for me. It plays wonderfully, sounds great, feels even better, and it looks rad as fuck. For those curious, I paid $570. Certainly not a steal, but it would probably cost me more to build this up on my own and it's 90% where I want it to be so I'm pleased. Which leads me to....

MODS

I was planning on replacing the pickups but I really like them so far so I'm gonna keep em for now; however, I have a few ideas on how to make this thing even cooler. First, I'm going to replace the tone knob with a blend knob so I can blend between the neck and bridge pickups in various amounts. Then I'm going to repurpose the pickups selectors. I want to keep the strangle switch as I surprisingly like it a lot. For one of the remaining switches I'm going to have a dark tone switch, inverse of the strangle switch, take away some high frequencies. Whenever I use the tone knob to darken my sound I pretty much always go to relatively the same setting, so I think this will be a fine substitute for a tone knob. As for the remaining switch, I'm not quite sure what to do. I don't really like the out of phase sound, a kill switch seems unnecessary, and I think a series/parallel switch might be not as useful if I have the pickup blending going on... any ideas on what I could do with that remaining switch?

& the granddaddy mod of all... have a pickup mounted behind the bridge and repurpose the rhythm circuit cavity to have an on/off switch, volume, and tone (knob/switch?) controls just for that pickup. I'm not quite sure what pickup I'd want back there. Since I'll have volume tone & tone controls for it I feel like it would make sense to have a fairly hot pickup with a wide magnetic range to pick up as much string vibration as possible, but I have no experience with this kind of thing. I feel like a lipstick would look ultra rad behind the bridge, or maybe a single coil alumitone might work better for the acoustic properties? Iunno, anyone have any suggestions?

So HOT!

Gorgeous guitar. For the last switch what about it bypasses everything and it's one pickup direct to the output jack?

As far as the pickup goes I would start by putting in whatever cheap single coil you can find to see what happens. Interested to see how it goes because I eventually want to get round to doing something similar with my jag.

Eddie (Totally Wired) built my Jazzmaster. Great guy and awesome guitars. Nice find man!!

Mod-wise, you could always try running a surface-mount goldfoil behind the bridge right to the jack to see if the tones are cool without having to route the body. I like the idea of repurposing the rhythm circuit for the controls for the behind-the-bridge pickup. Maybe the rhythm slider could be on/off for the behind-the-bridge pickup, and the third slider on the lower bout could be on/off for both of the other pickups. That could be really cool.

Old Rhythm Circuit (Upper Bout)
Behind-the-Bridge Pickup On/Off
B-t-B Vol.
B-t-B Tone

Old Lead Circuit (Lower Bout)
Neck + Bridge Pickups Master On/Off
N+B Dark Switch
N+B Strangle Switch
N+B Blend Pot
N+B Master Vol. Pot
B-t-B Tone

dope dope dope guitar kbits.

love the stain. there's a part of me that wants you to leave the finish as is and just really let it wear through the years, to, despite your 4-string low ended tendencies, to create the ultimate battle axe with chips and dings and what have you.

really a beautiful jag, man.

Yeah I think I'd like to just let it wear away as time goes on, I just don't know if that would adversely effect the body after so much time. But I don't really have to worry about that for now so we'll let it get cruddy!

That's a sweet guitar, man!