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Hi Richard,
I was in the same boat as you. Before I was fully committed to surf
music, I bought a Squier Vista Super-Sonic, which is the sister
guitar to your Jagmaster. It has a weird reverse Jaguar body,
reverse headstock, blue sparkle finish, 2 humbuckers, and 2 volume
pots. I imagine this guitar was made at the height of the grunge
craze to give the kids a cheap offset-waist looking, lefty looking
(Cobain) guitar. I applaud Fender's efforts because maybe it saved a
few vintage Jaguars/Jazzmasters from getting the humbucker treatment
by grunge crazed kids.
In any event, I replaced the 2 volume pots with push/pull volume
pots, and then wired each switch on the pots to cut the humbucker in
half (some people call this coil tapping). Now I can get both
pickups in single coil mode, humbucker mode, or any combination in
between. Plus I like having two volume pots so you can blend the two
pickups together. It was a pretty easy mod (I am certainly no expert
and I did it myself over a 4 or 5 hour period late one Saturday
night).
This also worked out great because it doesn't change the appearance
of the guitar. At first I thought about just replacing the
humbuckers with single coils and be done with it. But then I
realized I would never, ever find a pickguard for that guitar in
that configuration, it would have to be custom made. I didn't want
to mess with that hassle.
BTW, if anyone wants to buy the original Atomic Humbuckers from that
guitar (I replaced them with clean Seymour Duncans) I'll give you a
good deal. :)
You don't see too many Super-Sonics around. There used to be a band
called "Johny and the Shamen", they were a Man or Astro-Man?
inspired band, and their guitar player played one. He replaced his
pickups with single coils and just left the original pickguard on,
so it looked kind of weird.
BN
--- In , Richard <errant_jedi@y...>
wrote:
> My only other guitar now besides my SGV 800 is a
> Squier Vista Jagmaster, which has a Seymour Duncan
> Distortion pickup at the bridge (the stock pup is
> gone). This is a great pickup for punk and rock 'n
> roll but it simply sounds too dirty for my taste when
> I'm trying to play surf and it also makes a horrible
> squealing noise when plugged into my Premier tank.
>
> The neck pickup's output is very low compared to the
> bridge's and turning the two on together doesn't
> really take away the dirtiness of the Distortion and
> kind of sucks a lot of the bite out of the tone.
>
> I don't want to change the stock configuration of the
> guitar, but I would like to be able to get a cleaner
> sound out of it. Does anybody use humbuckers and/or
> have any suggestions?
>
> Richard
