Jaguar HH Special edition CIJ

myopicvoid

Hi Boys and Girls, after a year of scrimping and saving I finally got the guitar I always wanted, a Jaguar. To me it is the sexiest guitar made. Sounds awsome plugged into my hotrod deluxe. Crank the drive all the way up and this baby comes alive. I also have a Vox tonelab SE....endless possibilities.

I do have a ? though. Maybe somebody knows. On the lower horn on the lead circuit there are 3 switches. The two towards the neck I believe switch between the bridge and neck pickup. The 3rd switch seems to do nothing. I assume it should do something maybe a tone cut or a coil tap.

Can someone enlighten me.

Pedro

Ha ha! I thought exactly the same thing when I bought my HH. The 3rd switch is the "strangle" or bass-cut switch. It brings a little capacitor into the circuit that cuts some of the bass out of the signal. I'm told it makes a fair difference with single coil pickups, but I found it pretty useless on the HH. I put a new 4wire pickup in recently and use that switch as series / parallel instead - much more versatile. You could do the same with the stock pickups but you'd have to completely disassemble them and run a couple of new wires.

My advice (if you want it!) would be to stick with it as is for a few months and you might end up liking the subtlety of the bass cut. It does kind of help a solo cut through a bit. Maybe.

Oh, and in case you can't tell, the switch is on when it's up!

GP

Making the value of the cap smaller will cut more bass and might make this setting more useable. Because it's a passive high pass filter there'll be some loss in volume if you make the value too small though.

handen

Pics!! Post em!

MrArkadin

Yeah the HH low cut is subtle at best. i have been thinking of replacing the humbuckers and using that switch as a coil tap for a bit of single coil action from time to time.

Pedro, is there ample space inside for a battery or do you have to carve out a bit of guitar wood?

Pedro

Mr Arkadin said: Pedro, is there ample space inside for a battery or do you have to carve out a bit of guitar wood?

I didn't put a battery in, just a different pickup so it's still passive electronics. First tried it as a straight coil tap but found the drop in output too much, so wired it as a series / parallel switch instead. In parallel mode it has a fairly authentic single coil sound but higher output than just using one coil. I'll try and post some sound clips tonight or tomorrow if you're interested. I didn't get the wiring quite right so if I put it in parallel and try and engage the bridge pup as a humbucker as well there's some kind of semi-short circuit, which is actually kind of interesting!

I don't think you'd be able to fit a battery anywhere without a bit of digging into the body, BTW.

MrArkadin

Oh, OK - don't want to really gouge out holes in lovely HH, so that passive idea sounds cool - i want to replace the pick-ups anyway. i might get a pro to do it though as the wiring in Jags is already a bit mad with single coils, let alon 4 wires. Sound clips and any piccies are very much appreciated.

In parrallel mode do you still have the advantage of humbuckers, ie. no noise, but with a single coil sound? Also the short-circuit sounds interesting if you can get some glitchy sounds out of it i might want to mis-wire mine too!

Just need to settle on some pick-ups. i like retro looking ones, but obviously sound comes first. i don't like the metal covered ones as the cover rattles when i'm playing hard. Any suggestions?

Pedro

Hmm, I've got a little 30 second MP3 demo of how it sounds, but being a bit of a techno-phobe dumb ass I don't know what to do with it so I can link to it, as it's just sitting in my girlf's laptop at the moment. Where do people usually put their soundclips?

Anyhoo, in answer to your question, in parallel there is a bit of noise. More than series, but still less than single coils. So it's kind of a half-way house. The sound is very difficult to tell from standard single coil (I'm comparing it to my Jap squire strat here). If anyone can tell me how to post sound clips it'll be easier!

I can't recommend any particular pickup cos I'm still new to humbuckers! Depends what style you want really. I've got a seymour duncan stagmag cos they're meant to sound more like single coils when split (so the blurb says). Compared to the original dragster pup, I'd say it's got a slightly richer mellower tone in series mode. I've never split any other pickups tho so nothing to compare that aspect with! The seymour D website is pretty useful

The wiring isn't complex but it is fiddly so if you're not confident with a soldering iron might be a difficult job!

Your covers rattle? That's weird, mine are wedged on good and tight, with a dollop of solder on the bottom.

MrArkadin

Yeah, when i play quietly or not plugged in i hear this rattle - i thought it was the pots at first - had to touch eveything until i eventually found out it was the neck pickup - not noticeable at high volumes though 😁

Pedro

Pedro said: First tried it as a straight coil tap but found the drop in output too much, so wired it as a series / parallel switch instead. In parallel mode it has a fairly authentic single coil sound but higher output than just using one coil.
in answer to your question, in parallel there is a bit of noise. More than series, but still less than single coils. So it's kind of a half-way house. The sound is very difficult to tell from standard single coil

Right, well it turns out everything I said before is actually a load of rubbish. I thought I'd got it wired the way described but on taking the switch off last night found I was wrong! When I did it originally it was quite late at night 😁

Just fixed it so the strangle switch flips from parallel to single coil, and parallel doesn't have higher output at all. And doesn't hum either. Both parallel and single coil are lower output than series humbucker, but not a massive amount. In single it doesn't quite have the quack of a strat bridge pup (partly cos I wired it to use the coil furthest from bridge, to compensate for drop in volume) but still nice for a bit of variety.