creepingnet's Fender Music Gear Setup

Ah, the Fender Music Master, the little one-pickup wonder Fender introduced in 1956 as a 22.5" Scale student guitar, that managed to hang on the longest of any of the original Fullerton run guitars.

While I own a 1971 model, I'm kind of also reviewing Music Masters in general.

It seems when Fender kept producing the Music Master through the second generation and third generations of Student models from 1965-1981, these guitars were default to a 22.5" scale or 24" scale 22 fret vintage maple neck in the thinnest "A" Nut width, making these the skinniest necks Fender made, and also making these the preferred neck of Nirvana guitarist Kurt Cobain (his Jag-Stang and Mustangs were all based on these same necks as they were also used on the Duo-Donic II, Mustang, and Bronco as well as the Music Master, it's just on at least some of those other models, it appears one had a choice of neck width).

The bodies are typically made of Ash, Alder, Poplar, or I've heard reports of Mustangs having fabled Mahogany bodies (not sure why Fender would be using Mahogany, but then I DID know they made acoustic guitars too at that time - which I think everyone forgets). Mine has a poplar body.

The one I have is tricked out and modded, the only original 1971 parts are the body and neck. IT started off an ex-Grunge band guitar of some sort probably used by some Seattle grunge scenester decades ago and then lost in a closet before handing it over to the guitar store to use for parts.

Stripping off the paint reveals quite a bit of Bondo was used on this body to level-out the finish at finishing time. It's original color was Dakota red, then over it's lifetime it was repainted black, white, sort of a darkened vintage-white, and then some kind of odd jade-on-foam-green sort of color, and it must have been badly done because you could see where it had stickers once upon a time.

Someone routed it for an extra switch, probably because a second pickup was added at some point, a common modification to the Music Master as stock it lacks a bridge pickup, which in certain genres is extremely limiting.

I assembled this guitar from the cast-off body and neck in 2014 after sitting for 3 years unfinished but strung up and playable at least with a Fender Tornado string through bridge (another butchering a previous owner did was drill it for a string through Stratocaster bridge). I finished it for a total of $9.40 in parts including the Tap Plastics orange acrylic pickguard. The stickers were stocking stuffers from the previous x-mas.

In the bridge I have a Peavey P12 humbucker from a 80's Peavey Falcon that weighs in at around 14.6K Ohms resistance, and in the neck a super-tall Strat single coil from a 1993 Washburn MG-43. Everything dumps into a single 500K Audio pot and 3-way switch, with a 3-way series/parallel/split switch for the humbucker, allowing me to get a wide array of Mustang type sounds. Intiially it had a home made pickup in the bridge to test an idea with hum cancellation that kinda-sorfta worked but I have put on the back burner for awhile to focus on other projects.

With the original home-built pickup the guitar premiered with Zombie Jihad at Hempfest 2014 and was quite loud. There's a video of it being used through a Bugera 333XL head into a Mesa Boogie 8-ohm 4X12 on the seely stage playing a Led Zepplin cover.

After leaving ZJ the guitar was modified for my current (as of this writing) 90's cover band as a Nirvana Style guitar for doing Nirvana covers. Bye bye hempmaster - hello Kurtmaster.

So far this is one of my favorite hardtails, only eclipsed by the Hondo Paul Dean II.

The Fender Jag-Stang in it's stock form is a decent enough guitar, but I play one with EMG pickups in it that I got on my 17th birthday that has been my favorite "go-to" ever since, and she's got the scars to show for it.

In it's stock Format, the Jag-Stang is a quality instrument built from Fujigen Gakki (1995-1997) or Dyna Gakki (1997-2001, 2003-2006) in Japan for Fender Japan. Despite being a "unfinished" design as the second prototype was to go to designer and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain the day he died that fateful day in 1994, it's surprisingly great. It's only real shortcomings only being the bridge pickup which is a bit anemic at 7.4-8.2K ohms on the earlier models (which had a DiMarzio sourced H3 or H8 humbucker) - the later Alder bodied variants featured a Fender Santa Ana humbucker that addressed all these tonal issues. In my case, the previous owner replaced the original pickups with an EMG SA in the neck, and an EMG 81 in the bridge sometime about 1998 per date code on the pickups (my Jag-Stang is a 1995 1st run model with the 60th Anniversary and "Designed by Kurt Cobain" stickers on the back of the headstock, confirmed by body and neck build dates).

The early Jag-Stangs were made of basswood, which tends to absorb extreme highs and mids a bit, making it a much woolier guitar. Playing an alder model gave a more balanced response due to a thicker wood density. This also affects finish durability - my 95' is a literal relic, dents, dings, scratches everywhere, all of them from 17 years of hard gigging and studio work. It does not help that the paint on these, particularly the early ones, was just one giant thick glopping coat of sonic blue or Fiesta Red.

Now to one of my favorite features, the vibrato. The Fender Dynamic Vibrato is one of my favorite units of all time. It's smooth, like a Kahler, but I don't need to drag an entire pile of hex keys with me to tune, or make small adjustments. It's also more economically sound than a Floyd Rose because replacment parts are cheap, and I burn through things like pivot points and knife edges a LOT less as fast as I do on my Floyd Rose guitars. I can whammy all day on this thing and it never goes out of tune.

However, in 17 years, I have made some mods and improvements. The EMG Pickups in this thing sound amazing - TBH, I've only ever played one out of the hundreds of guitars I've played that matched the Jag-Stang with that particular set of pickups, and it was a Fender Prodigy. I added a Pi2 Phase inverter preamp to allow me to still get the out-of-phase sounds the Jag-Stang is somewhat known for having (but minus the volume loss), added tone recovery cap brought to an extreme, giving me more tonal versitiliy, no-load tone control. All of these turned the Jag-Stang from a great "grunge" guitar into a Pensa Suhr terrifying, Tom Anderson scaring tonal chameleon. It makes an EXCELLENT platform for hopped up circuitry once you figure out how those 3-way switches work. Also, my modification improved on the pickup selection on-the-fly because I designated one switch to pickup selection and the other to tonal edits.

17 years of everyday hour or more play on this thing and of course I had to replace some parts. I had to replace the tuners in 2006 because the originals wore plum out from all the tuning changes I do, CGDGBE, Drop-D, whole step down, 1/2 step down, and back again a lot. The Ping sourced Kluson copies are just not up to the task for a lifetime, I ultimately got a set of proper fitting Kluson Revolutions on there and had my split shaft sealed gear cake and eat it too.

Another thing is that Cobain bumped into the perfect combination of size and shape on this by accident (with help of Fender Custom Shop luthier Larry Brooks) - the result is a guitar that looks a little odd at first glance but is extremely comfortable despite not having contours, and the way the shape sits makes it not look stupid on hulky tall guys like me - like I've been told Mustangs tend to do to me.

Basically put, the Jag-Stang is a well balanced (especially the later stock models), fast playing, great sounding guitar with a few quirks that are easily ironed out. Sure some might want to ride the Nirvana legacy to death, but after picking up a pre-modded version, I felt like taking the Jag-Stang into it's own place, which it also can do just as well as any Strat or Telecaster.

It was 2009, Hipster-dom was riding high, and Jazzmasters were starting to go for a premium. and I wanted one because I always loved the Jazzmaster since playing a Foto Flame 1994 MIJ model with Seymour Duncan pickups. When the only Jazzmaster you can find costs at least $800 - why spend it all at once when you can spend it gradually over time.

But Jazzmasters had some things with them that I did not like, in particular, only 21 frets, out of the box the bridge usually needs some work, the fretboard radius is a bit too round for the scale length, the tuners are flimsy on some of hte reissues, and the bridge pickups on every Jazzmaster I ever played were anemic and/or imbalanced to the neck (ie, the hotter pickup always was in the neck for some reason).

So this was my attempt to tweak the Jazzmaster into what I think a modern Jazzmaster should be. A Jazzmaster that can rock out with the best of them but not lose any of the unique traits that made the Jazzmaster such a special sounding, playing, and feeling guitar.

I started off with a Swamp Ash body, so as to have a pretty finish, light weight, and some dampening for the high frequencies - basically to absorb some of the "Ice Picky-ness" of the Jazzmaster but not lose the highs so much it sounds less like a Jazzmaster and more generic.

The next thing addressed were the electronics, in particular, the pickups. In the bridge is a Alnico 2 10% overwound Pickup Wizards Jazzmaster pickup, measuring in at 8.8K Ohms resistance, with a Alnico V AVRI 62' Jazzmaster pickup in the neck to add a little more spank and sparkle to the neck position whilst keeping that signature Jazzmaster sound to it. The pickups are NOT RWRP as Fender and Pickup Wizards seemed to have done it differently.

These two are wired into a standard Jazzmaster wiring harness wired with cloth wire - 50's style - with no alteration from the standard Jazzmaster schematic at all. The Jazzmaster is rather versitile to begin with so no need to fix what's not broken to begin with. When you play one, you have to think with a bit of inverse logic of other guitars though - on the lead circuit, you want to turn the volume DOWN to warm things up and increase the gain, not the tone, and turn it up if you want to clean things up and gain more twang. The sweet spot is around 7 - gives it a very P-90-like output, flat out sounds like a Pissed off Telecaster on steroids with more bass and naturally scooped mids.

I forewent a vibrato unit with the Trem Lock both for budget reasons and that I've never had to use that feature on any offset I've ever used with this vibrato, and I use my own special setup that increases the vibrato range, bringing it into first album Van-Halen territory - that's right, I use this guitar to dive bomb - people said it could not be done, so I looked at the mechanics, figured it out, and did it!

I used the much maligned stock bridge, one of the import variants. I did the same mod to it I did to my Jaguar, 2 thicker springs on the outer E saddles to box the middle ones in, and angled the Low E saddle upward to lock the low E string in place and prevent it from jumping. Works just as great, and it increases sustain from both the scale length and the "3rd bridge" behind the bridge - which is like having a whole second instrument there - either that or a built in reverb tank made of sympathetic vibrations - one of my favorite features of the Jaguar/Jazzmaster vibrato setup. The main problem with these bridges has almost always been part tolerances rather than breakover angle.

The Neck was the other major upgrade to the design - I wanted something skinny, with a flat radius, 22 frets, and something that looked late 70's/early 80's - so what I wound up with is a Tommy's Custom Bodies and Necks 22 Fret Maple neck with maple fretboard and a CBS Fender headstock. I put a CBS Fender Decal on it just to see how many people would think this was a custom shop build, LOL. I'm planning to remove it in the future and put my own waterslide on there (just a sponge away from that). The flat 12" Radius and bi-directional truss rod has allowed this guitar to be probably one of the fastest playing Jazzmasters ever made - J.Mascius would HATE this thing I'm sure, strung up with .009's and only something like a 10th of an inch between the 22nd fret and the strings with little to no buzzing if you play light and fast like a metal player. The added 22nd Fret means I can do some mondo bends up to F#-A on the high E at the 22nd fret, effectively pushing the guitar's overall pitch range up a little bit too.

That said I have had some improvements to make to it. The original selector switch I used was a tad junky, had to re-bend the leafs inside the switch to keep contact. Switched to a Gibson switch and the problem went away. Have been toying with installing a "Super Switch" on it at some point to add even more tonal options like series/parallel/phase reversal. Another change soon coming is Kluson Revolution tuners because I found the Kluson Tone Pros I originally used are a bit too flimsy for frequent gigging as I played this guitar out a lot and found those tuners made the tuning stability a bit of a crap shoot - but I've been testing the Revolutions and they sound better as they add a little more mass to the headstock, and also are a LOT more stable, less drifting, and no play in the keys.

Either way, I've toyed with building small batches of hand-built guitars and I consider this a prototype to my own tribute to the original Jazzmaster. Sort of the Caroll Shelby Jazzmaster if you will - looks like a production guitar because at it's core, it is, but has all the right tweaks in the right places to make it play fast, stay in tune, and be versitile enough to not be limited to just being a Grungy Fuzzer and a Surfy Plinker. It's just as at home growling out UFO and Scorpions songs as it is getting fuzzed up for some Bush, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr, or dripping in reverb and taking the classic Ventures route, or the wacky B-52's route.

While more recently wideley accepted as a "Deluxe Bass" - it seems in the years prior to the past few, this bass was a "whatchamacallit" - is it a Baritone? A Bass? Both? The answer is Yes.

I sold my Fender Mustang guitar and Bass and replaced it with this after seeing Phil-X demo a few vintage ones on Youtube, and at the time, on a huge B-52's kick - I started looking more and more at this as a possible solution to try some "Ricky Wilson-Esque" things out along with the alternate tuned guitars thing I was already latching onto. In the end, I found a shocking jack of all Trades.

The Bass VI is a 30" Scale Six String Bass with a timbre more like a guitar thanks to a trio of Alnico V magnet 6.4K Ohm Fender Jaguar pickups in all three positions. With a skinny fast neck, split shaft tuners, and a Jaguar-like circuit, a Jag-a-holic like me could not resist. Anyting that can lay down some bass tracks, go battle the Rock Lobster, and then go hang around in Korn-ville like a 7-string can with some creativity and extra tightness makes it now my current go-to bass - and with 3 pickups and rather responsive volume and tone controls, it can emulate just about everything else - this bass basically replaced 4 bass guitars in my collection.

Prior to this bass, I used a 1987 B.C. Rich Ironbird NJ, a 1986 Segovia Bass Guitar, a 2009 Fender MIJ Mustang Bass, and a 2008 Epiphone EB-0 bass - out of all those, the Mustang was my favorite but it just did not have the "kick in the ass" of the B.C. Rich or the Segovia, and the EB-0 was just an awful piece of crap that would not stay in tune and was really just a one-trick pony - and it's rare I'll trash a Bass or guitar, but the EB-0 I feel is deserving of it.

The Bass VI can be like a Danelectro longhorn bass in the bridge, a Jazz Bass with both bridge and middle on, does a fairly interesting P-Bass rendition in the middle somewhere between a P-Bass and A Mustang or Musicmaster Bass, and the neck position has all the tonal character I did sort of like in the EB-0, but this one actually stays in tune and is not a one-trick pony due to an overbearing 32K ohm mudbucker in the neck. As a bass, very versitile, I find my Segovia does not get played much anymore because the VI does a tighter version of that sound with careful EQ.

As a baritone, this thing nails that Ricky Wilson "Rock Lobster" tone in the bridge position like a champ. Apply distortion and it can range from being the sonic version of a concrete drill, to being able to roam around in Nu-Metal/Death Metal/Doom & Gloom sludge lands with ease, and enough frets (21) are there to get up in the Guitar range for some decent soloing - and on top of it, it has a decent tremolo bar!

I mostly play lead guitar and I have used this thing on several recordings.since 2014, including Zombie Jihad's "You Will See Demons" and my own Mad-Mike stuff on Soundcloud. It's also going to be playing an expanded role in a future metal project of mine. I've been considering now doing some arrangements using 2 Bass VI's where they interleave between bass and guitar ranges. It's just been quite a catalyst for creativity because it's an instrument that is so undefined on a specific role or pigeonholed by a specific artist, leaving an open door for all sorts of interpretations on how to play it creatively.

I bought my Jaguar in December of 2005, it's a 1998 Model built at the Dyna Gakki plant for Fender Japan in December 97' (Neck Date), and January 98' (Body Date). I bought mine already customized.

SPECIFICATIONS (STOCK)

NECK: Maple neck, 24" scale, 22 Vintage frets, pearl dot inlays 7.16" Fretboard radius, Kluson Ping replication tuning machines

BODY: Basswood, or Alder (mine's Alder) Jaguar style body with vintage routing

PICKUPS: 2 Fender 62' Jaguar reissue single coils, 6.4K Each, Alnico V or Ceramic Magnets

CONTROLS: Separate Rhythm and Lead Circuits, Rhythm volume, Rhythm Tone, Rhythm/Lead Selector Switch, neck pickup on/off (Lead), bridge pickup on/off (lead), Strangle/Bass Cut (lead), Lead volume, Lead tone

BRIDGE/TAILPIECE: Fender Floating Vibrato with rocker bridge with adjustable string spacing

COLORS AVAIL/COLOR COMBOS 3 Tone Sunburst w/ Tortishell Pickguard Olympic White w/ Tortishell Pickguard Candy Apple Red w/ W/B/W pickguard and Matching Headstock 3-Tone Sunburst Foto Flame (fake Flame Kodak overlay on body under finish) w/ red Tortishell White Blonde finish w/ Red Tortishell Pickguard and gold hardware

Mine came from the Guitar Hangar in December 05' with an unbranded Jaguar/Jazzmaster hardshell case, modified with a pair of Seymour Duncan SCR1B Cool Rails, 500K pots in the lead circuit (tone being a push/pull coil split for the cool rails), and a Gibson ABR-1 Tune-O-Matic filed down to fit the fretboard radius.

The original Cool Rails were found to sound so close to Jaguar pickups in timbre with the 500K pots I chose to leave those in, and put cut-off Jaguar pickup covers and Jaguar claw side-pieces onto them - all that did was redistribute the magnetic field a bit just bringing the tone more inline with a Jaguar, but with hum cancellation.

I also took out that crappy Tune-O-Matic that was chopping my hand up and eating up the strings (I use the vibrato on this guitar, HARD and OFTEN), and replaced it with a bridge identical to the one that the Japanese Jaguars regularly come with. I did, however, take some time learning the hows and whys of the Jaguar bridge on my own and came up with my own way of dealing with said bridge and it's so laughably simple. Basically, I play my Jaguar with .009's on it - most people say to put 11's or higher on them because they are short scale and heavier strings stay in place - but they actually don't because beyond a certain point, the strings being too big for the slots (especially the Low E which is the #1 culprit in this problem) can cause them to jump the saddles even more than light strings would at lighter tension because there is less material deep enough to hold them in place.

The second problem with this bridge that people misunderstand is the breakover angle, anything 10 degrees and over is sufficient enough string tension, the real problem is tolerances. The looser tolerances of guitar production say versus, something NASA would have made, are what really causes all the problems people think goes with breakover angle. Mastery gets around this by putting deeper saddles into their bridges as well as a pair of fixed allen key adjustments on a pivot for each pair of saddles. and Staytrem just uses Mustang-style saddles that are only rounded on top, cut to the radius of the guitar, and have nylon-embedded fixtures meant to hold them still. I do this on the Jaguar by cutting a strong humbucker spring in half - putting one half on the low E, the other on the High E, and angling the E string saddles upward on one side to wedge them in. Doing this makes it rock solid stable even without a shim or a breakover over 10 degrees, and it keeps the extra behind-the-bridge ringing that I love so much.

So far though, in the 10 years I've played this guitar, it's been an unstoppable companion. It's only broken one string at a gig, it's never broken down or spent a period of time in limbo due to parts. I did have to fix one grounding issue with the rhythm circuit and I replaced the tuners just as they were wearing out because those Ping manufactured Kluson copies just don't last - I put Kluson Revolutions in as I prefer seald gear durability but wanted to retain the split shafts and vintage look. I've hard the stock pickups these guitars have, honestly, mine more closely matches a Classic Player with the stock 60's wiring or a Squier VM due to the hotter bridge pickup.

And you'd think with all the pickup/electronics mods it'd sound different, but to tell you the truth, the Jaguar offers so much uniqueness in it's overall design that it sort of has a sound that transcends the pickups put in it because much of it's sound, the attack, the decay, the resonance, all the harmonic overtones from behind the bridge - are the result of that bridge system. All the pickups really do is amplify those things more if they are hotter. The cool rails just make it sound like a noiseless Jaguar. And sustain? I can make this thing sustain for days at stage volume using controlled feedback, and even then, plugged in, sustain is not really a problem at all on this guitar.

The only real cons are the original pickups I hear were not so great - microphonic, and tinny, probably due to incorrect construction, and the machine heads are crap. The rest of the complains most people have about the Jaguar I can look past because I know how to work with them or very frugally "fix" them in a way that does not affect the guitar or change it from what it is into another boring blahcaster. The EQ of the Cool rails might be what's making the 500K's work so well - aside from being quality switchcraft pots - as the Cool Rails have a tonal profile similar to a Jaguar except in ways that the 500K pots would help exaggerate to keep pushing the "overwound single coil" sound they are trying to emulate. Split I get more of a Goya/Teisco/Kawai/Sansui guitar sound, plinky, ice pickey, it's like 2 Jaguars in one - a Pre CBS with hot pickups (the first Jaguar I ever played), and a later CBS era model where they started winding them a bit less as hot.

And I'm not giving the 62' Reissue Jaguar high stars for mine alone. I've played quite a few other Japanese "62' Reissues" over the years and they have all been consistently great instruments. That's why the Jaguar became my #1 "off the rack guitar" - it's just buying my first one meant cutting cost by buying one modified, and then finding modding it back won't make any change serious enough to make it worth the money, leaving me with a bit of an "easter egg" from the previous owner via those Cool Rails.

And for those wondering on the Sound. The Typical Jaguar sound consists of a very balanced sounding neck pickup, and a very snarly, yarly, coarse sounding single coil in the back with tight lows and very present highs, together it sounds a bit like a Tele, but a little sweeter and floppier due to the shorter scale, a bit more harmonically rich. The Jaguar does have a fitting name, because, in the bridge especially, it has a very good "Bite" to it, especially when the gain is pushed, almost like a Gretsch with heavy overdrive, just not as sthick in the lower mids.

If you are used to a traditional setup, the Jaguar might be something you'd want to try out before buying because it does feel and play a bit differently, as well as the "duffy" or "tchak" type attack is not of the traditional electric guitar ilk in a lot of ways. It does not play like a Gibson or a Fender - it plays like a Jaguar, it's it's own thing capable of bringing something extra to all those it can emulate, and that's what I like about it.