Archive for the ‘Article’ Category
We often get questions from folks newly interested in the jag and jazzy like this one. So this post is for you owners out there to share your thoughts.
Are you a Fender Jaguar or Jazzmaster owner? What led you to your choice? And if you happen to own both we want to hear your comparisons between the two guitars.
While very similar on the surface the Jaguar and Jazzmaster have some basic differences. Below are some of the technical differences between the Classic Player Jaguar and Jazzmaster.
- The jazzmaster has a 25.5″ scale neck while the jaguar has a 24″ scale neck.
- The jazzmaster has 21 medium jumbo frets – the jaguar 22.
- The controls and pickup switching are different between the two.
- The significant differences between the pickups of the two.
- The new classic player jaguars also have more pickup options like the dual humbucker jaguar model.
With those basic differences what ultimately led to your choice? What do you recommend people currently shopping for one or the other look out for?
Fender Classic Player Jaguar
Fender Classic Player Jazzmaster
Thanks for sharing!
I just read through this great article and wanted to blog a link to it here without giving away too much of the content.
The name of the blog post over on yahoo is Like A Hurricane: The 20 Most Intense Tracks Of All Time… From “Gimme Shelter” To “Big-Eyed Beans From Venus”!.
There are some very good tracks here to listen too for those times your in the mood for intese tunes. I smell a new iPod playlist for this!
With the prime holiday buying season upon us what better time to put together a guide to help you pick something out for your favorite guitarist. Thanks to lots of great feedback from our forum users we put this together to show you some good gifts in various price ranges.
Before we get into the gifts we want to give a few words of caution. If you’re gifting guitar accessories, like strings or picks, note that brand, string gauge, and pick weights are important to a guitarist. If you don’t know what they use be sure and give gift receipts.
Price Range: $1 – $50
There is a lot to choose from in this range including sets of instrument cables, strings, lesson and tab books, straps, cheaper effect pedals, and many more accessories.
- Good instrument cables. Good cables can last for years. Don’t get cheap ones!
- String sets. Sets of 10 are usually in the $30 to $40 range.
- Effect Pedals. Lots of decent effect pedals under $50.
- Lesson and Tab Books
Some examples of items in this range.
- Boss DS-1 – $39
- Fender ‘57 Mini Twin – $49
- Pro Co Guitar Cables – price varies
- Boss SUPER OverDrive SD-1 – $49
- D’Addario String Sets – price varies
Price Range: $50 – $200
This price range opens up a lot more options for gifts.
- More effects pedals and multi-effect pedals.
- Smaller guitar amplifiers.
- Additional accessories like replacement pickups.
Some examples of popular items in this price range.
- Replacement Pickups – consult the giftee or give a gift card for these. Guitarist all have different preferences on pickups.
- Dunlop Original Crybaby Wah Pedal – $69.99
- Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer – $99.99
- Electro-Harmonix Classics Small Clone Chorus – $84.00
- Electro-Harmonix Classics USA Big Muff PI – $76.50
- DigiTech Whammy Pedal – $199.95
- Line 6 Spider III 30W 1×12 Combo – $199.99
- Vox Pathfinder 15R Combo – $119.00
Price Range: $200+
At this range it may be best to just give gift cards or credit at your local guitar shop. Since at this range you can start considering guitars as gifts it would be best for the player to try things out themselves.
However, being jag-stang.com we we recommend the following guitars:
- Fender Classic Player Jaguar – $799.99 – $849.99
- Fender Classic Player Jazzmaster – $799.99 – $849.99
- Fender ‘65 Mustang Reissue – $699.99
Support jag-stang.com this holiday season
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Now that Winter NAMM 2008 is complete we thought we would put together a summary of some of our favorites things from the show. Feel free to tell us your favorites by commenting this post.
AXL Badwater Guitars With “Eldorado” Body Style - great looking guitar with telecaster vibe
BOSS GT-10 Guitar Effects Processor
Bunch of new Gibson custom model guitars including a Steve Jones (Sex Pistols) model.
Gig-fx Pro-chop pedal for crazy chopping, panning, and tremelo effects. This could be a whole lot of fun.
So that was some of our favorites from the show. Doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of excitement from this years releases. I’m sure we missed a bunch so let us know if you saw any cool gear announced and what your favorites were.
(Note: Here is a link to harmony-central’s complete list of press releases from the show.)
Guitar World has opened up a new tabs site that they are calling it’s “Beta” phase. It’s a very interactive section featuring official Guitar World tabs and also user submissions and videos. The tab pages even have this neat automated scroller so you can jam without having to scroll the pages in mid song.
I have to wonder if they are paying publisher fees to avoid the issues all other tab sites have faced recently. They were obviously paying some kind of fees to put the tabs in the magazine so maybe it’s just an extension of those agreements.
Guitar World has finally made an interesting play in the web space after all these years. And it looks to be a great start. Better late than never right?!
We like Best/Most/Worst/etc lists. They seem to generate great discussion in all kinds of directions.
So here we present you with Blender.com’s “28 Most Recognizable Guitars”. The Fender Mustang, as made famous by Kurt Cobain, comes in at a very respectable 14 on the list.
This list is shown below. You can also check out the Blender article which includes great descriptions and video links for each entry. (Blender article link)
- 28. Buck Owens: Red, White and Blue acoustic
- 27. Les Claypool – Primus: The Rainbow Bass
- 26. Michael Angelo Batio: The Reverse Double-Neck
- 25. Dave Grohl – Foo Fighters: Dan Armstrong/Ampeg ARMG-2
- 24. Michael Anthony – Van Halen: Jack Daniel’s Bass
- 23. Angus Young – AC/DC: Gibson SG
- 22. Ace Frehley – KISS: Laser Guitar
- 21. Albert King: Gibson Flying V
- 20. Zakk Wylde – Ozzy Osbourne/Black Label Society: The Grail
- 19. Jerry Only – The Misfits: The Devastator
- 18. Billie Joe Armstrong – Green Day: Blue
- 17. Bootsy Collins: Space Bass
- 16. Dimebag Darrell Abbott – Pantera/Damageplan: The Dean From Hell
- 15. Rick Nielsen – Cheap Trick: Hamer Five-Neck
- 14. Kurt Cobain – Nirvana: Fender Mustang
- 13. ZZ Top: Dean Spinning Fur Guitar/Bass
- 12. Gene Simmons – KISS: Axe Bass
- 11. Eric Clapton: Blackie
- 10. B.B. King: Lucille
- 9. Jack White – White Stripes: 1964 J.B. Hutto Montgomery Airline
- 8. Bo Diddley: The Big B
- 7. Willie Nelson: Trigger
- 6. Prince: Purple Glyph Symbol Guitar
- 5. Paul McCartney – Beatles: Hofner Violin Bass
- 4. Jimmy Page – Led Zeppelin: Gibson SG Double Neck
- 3. Elvis Presley: Martin D-28 Acoustic
- 2. Eddie Van Halen – Van Halen: Frankenstrat
- 1. Jimi Hendrix: Fender Stratocaster
A common question of new owners of guitars with a Dynamic Vibrato is how to keep the tremolo arm in the tailpiece bar. The tremolo/bridge unit of the Fender jag-stang and most mustangs is a Dynamic Vibrato, so this article applies to both the jag-stang and mustang.
The first thing to know is that the tremolo bar itself does not “snap” or screw into place like the tremolo bar of a stratocaster. The tremolo bar is held in place by pressure from a small allen screw in the tailpiece bar.
The photo below points to the location of this allen screw. Note the location indicated by the blue arrow pointing into the end of the tailpiece bar.
So to hold your tremolo bar in place get the bar in a position you are comfortable with and then snug the screw in the end of the tailpiece using a 4mm (or 5/32″) allen wrench. Don’t over tighten this screw. (see below)
So another very common problem is that the screw in the end of the tailpiece bar will be missing. They fall out very easily.
There are not a lot of options for finding a replacement screw. You may have to buy an entire dynamic vibrato tailpiece that includes the screw. Or another option would be to pull the tailpiece bar off the guitar and take it into your local hardware store looking for a screw that will fit.
[If anyone has found an exact replacement for this screw please let us know the details and we'll add it to this article.]
[The following article was submitted by jag-stang.com visitor Lonnie. He was inspired to share the story of his strat-stang creation after reading about the Fender Mu-uar in a previous post. Please enjoy Lonnie's great story below. ]
Back in 1981 a high school buddy loaned me 1966 Mustang and allowed me to string it left-handed to try it out. Even with that awkward setup that neck fit my hand perfectly. I could not find a lefty Mustang anywhere so I ended up buying a Strat instead, which had its own nice features, but I never forgot how much I liked the feel of that Mustang neck.
Then in 1994 I walked into a music store and saw a new lefty reissue Mustang. I wanted it badly but I was unemployed and broke so I had to pass it up, swearing that I would someday come back and buy it. A year later I had a good job and was on my feet again, but when I went back to that music store I found out the Mustang had already been discontinued.
I kept looking and in 1998 I bought a `96 Jag-Stang (image) new for an astonishing $330. The neck was fantastic–heavenly! It felt just like the neck on my friend’s old Mustang. The body, however, was a different story. Sitting or standing, I just couldn’t get comfortable with it. I wished I could put that Jag-Stang neck on a Strat body but I knew they would not be compatible.
Then I remembered Warmoth made a 7/8 scale Strat body and I contacted them and asked if it would work. The owner at the time, Ken Warmoth, explained that he had designed the 7/8 body back in the 70’s as a direct replacement for a Mustang body, so the project was a go. In 1999 I ordered an alder body with hardtail bridge (let’s face it, tremolo just does not work on a 24″ scale) and fire engine red gloss polyurethane. I also had to buy a pickguard and bridge that specifically fit this body. I sold all the extra Jag-Stang parts to finance the purchase.As any Fender tinkerer knows, American Fenders were built with S.A.E. measurements and Japanese Fenders are Metric so mixing those parts require a little bit of nudging.
I had to slightly widen the neck pocket to accept the JS neck. After a lot of sweat and prayer it came together nicely. My goal was to build a Strat-stang, a hybrid of the parts I liked from the Strat and Mustang. As you can see from the photos, I chose a Strat contoured body, pickguard, pickup setup, bridge and jack, but with a Mustang scale and knobs.
The bridge pickup is from the Jag-stang and the other two are temporaries from a Squire Strat, and eventually they will have solid black Mustang covers. I always liked the flexibility of the Strat Elite pushbutton pickup selector and incorporated that as well. I don’t like having the volume knob so close to the bridge so I plugged that hole and used the Mustang’s 1 volume/1 tone setup. Strat knobs are numbered right-handed which makes them confusing in a lefty setup; I prefer Mustang knobs because they’re easier to grip. I chose red, white and black to mimic the color scheme of my beloved `73 Musicmaster bass.
The guitar is a terrific success. It is a joy to play, lightweight,absolutely comfortable and sounds delicious with acres of surfy twang and slink. I coated the routings with NickelPrint, which is a conductive paint that acts as a reasonably good EMF shield, and covered the back of the pickguard with aluminum foil duct tape. The end result is a silent guitar with no crackle or hum. I use D’Addario Light Top/Heavy Bottom strings, which seem to work well with the short scale.
My boss’s band has a lefty guitarist who has played it on a few occasions and loves it, wishing he had one of his own. I had hoped to build another with humbuckers to act as a pseudo Les Paul, but that leads to the down side of the story:
Two years ago I called up Warmoth to order a 7/8 scale pickguard cut for humbuckers, with the intention that if it sounded good like that I would order another body and build a second guitar. To my dismay I found out that Warmoth had been sold and they were no longer making any 7/8 scale parts. Worse yet, they had even tossed out the old templates. So now my StratStang is literally a one-of-a-kind.
To add insult to injury, Warmoth now makes Mustang parts and Fender is producing Mustangs yet again–both right-handed only. Needless to say, my opinion of Warmoth is just as obscene as my opinion of Fender.
Additional photos below. Click thumbnails for larger images.
[Authored by: Lonnie]
