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Hi all, This looks like a great forum! I recently bought a Squier Classic Vibe Jazzmaster. I have not bought a new guitar in perhaps 15 years and was amazed at the quality for a cheap instrument. My friend gave me some American Vintage 65 Jazzmaster pickups he had lying about to upgrade however I have to say I quite like the stock pickups. My question is just are AV65 pickups significantly better quality and will I find a distinct tonal difference or should I just stick with the stock ones? If I had not got the AVs I would be happy with the stock ones but of course now I am intrigued to see if there is a difference! If I soldered I would do it myself and see what I prefered but I don't so deciding if worth the money and time to get someone to do it. Btw I play jazzy blues stuff like T-Bone Walker and some surfy stuff. Thanks in advance!

Been playing my classic player Jaguar HH for years, and I still really want a Jag-stang. I think all the Fenders one simply put are crap and I'd rather build my own. I am eyeing up ordering a body and neck from Warmoth, and want some opinions about how I should spec it. Body I'm painting the guitar myself, in an old chevy colour called Ermine white, and I am putting a silver pearl pickguard on it. I am looking at buying locally some vintage Dimarzio dual sound humbuckers, to do an HH setup in this guitar complete with coil tapping and all that fun stuff. I think I want to angle both humbuckers (pickguards are only $33, so if I hate it it's cheap to replace, and universal routing). Neck CBS Mustang/Jaguar spec, 24" scale, 22 frets, obviously stuff. I'm thinking flame maple with a black ebony board, mother of pearl dot inlays, wide & tall stainless frets, Gotoh/grover tuner size, a 10-16" fretboard radius with the largest nut available (1-11/16") and with a clear gloss finish over it all.  Now getting my specs aside, I am not sure which bridge I should opt for, a Mustang or a Tune-o-matic bridge. I have an old Adjust-o-matic bridge from my Classic Player Jaguar sitting around, since I converted my Jaguar to a staytrem. I don't know how much vibrato I'm going to use on this guitar, but I'd still like to have it there. With the 10-16" compound radius, 1-11/16th nut, and a TOM being 12" radius from what I understand, what would the best choice be? Thank you in advance

Hey, i just wanted to chime in that one thing i’ve tried when going for something vaguely similar was putting my jag-stang pickups out of phase and turning the amp up to get some more dirt on it. I felt that sound had some of the really pretty strange kind of ‘something” to be specific… But i’ve been doing engineering stuff for a long, long time and eventually was messing with phase on some instruments recorded with multiple mics and the thought occurred that a part of the sound that i noticed and felt was present might possibly have some strange comb filtering/phase stuff from microphones not quite in phase…and i think that helps as well, and that theory was somewhat confirmed years later as i came across the multitracks for the b-side MV and on that one Mr. Albini definitely just had multiple mics on the amp while purposely ignoring the 3:1 “rule” and using the timing differences to work like a very strange eq. And then also there is a fair amount of bleed in those recordings and the original “scratch” guitar tracks (tracked live) kinda bled into the other instruments’ tracks and they were pretty out of tune (i was surprised!) and that might add a weird ghostly/out of phase type thing (i was also fascinated to (FINALLY!) figure out about the bass tone on that album…i had talked to several people and mostly they talked about using a very short (highpassed?) delay…but after hearing the multitracks, i think it is absolutely from the bass bleeding into the drum tracks (and also the multi mic on the amp, but the weird airiness i believe is the bleed into the drums.)   sorry for going on and on and on, this is a topic i’ve been fascinated with for a while and i’m at work and super bored and a bit “groovy” feeling right now…lol. I hope it might be of some use possibly. Cheers!

I think the MIJ is the better option. In the future, I can imagine the MIJ being worth more than the reissues, as well as Japanese guitars tend to be much higher quality than Mexican.

Hey, regarding the "American made", you're correct about the only ones being American were Cobain's. I'm unsure why they called it American made, I'm sure they meant Mexican made.