Premier Rock Forum

I feel like this was probably done at some point but I couldn't find a thread, so maybe not.

My bandmate found the coolest pickups for his Squire Jaguar. Bringing it to practice he's struggled with how much less sustain it has than his JM. Seems like a great guitar for spiky riffs, downstrum rocking, surfyness, but not as much for lyrical single note passages or more sustained arpeggio bits.

I like the idea of Jaguars but yeah the short scale and tinny pickups are limiting. JMs are more versatile and I think the pickups look cooler.

I don’t know if I prefer Jaguars but every band does not need a Jazzmaster

Jags look better, but for sound, playability and vibe the JM is easily ahead.

I had a player series Jag for a bit....having small hands, I'd thought I'd love the short scale, but...I did not. 24" is really short! I've been on 25.5" since age 15, and I think my hands are just conditioned to it. Anyway, it looked killer (Capri Orange) and the pickups sounded good, but it was kinda heavy, so between that and short scale I sold it to a friend for a nice price.

So I vote Jazzmaster. I think JM's are the coolest Fender body style, you can put any pickups/trem on one and it'll look cool. If I were a bigger dude I'd just have a whole fleet of JM's, but alas I am not, and a strat fits me perfect, so I have a fleet of them instead. But I love my Warmoth Jazzmaster.

Also have to give a nod to the Jazzcaster, I think the tele parts look great on the JM body.

Any excuse to post pix....

Jazzmasters are better instruments overall, so there you go. I remember feeling like I caught a stray when eephus once referred to another "slapdick with a jazzmaster" several years ago, because a) he's right, there are a lot of slapdicks with JM's, but 2) he's also wrong because they're cool looking.

I have had several in the past and have sold them all though - the stock is too fussy. I plan on building one this year that isn't as fussy, but more fun - and though I really love the way a JM pickup looks on a JM, the simple example above has great potential. I'm a sucker for the flattop aged nickel humbucker like those.

During COVID, one of my pickups was a Squier CV Jaguar I ended up pouring a lot of time and effort into only to sell it. Once I got it looking the way I wanted it was real cool but the pickups didn’t really do much for me and felt prone to microphonic feedback. I figured it was an easy-come/easy-go situation to get a guitar I’ve always wanted since high school and flip it. A little bummer but at this point I have like 3-4 show-ready guitars in my arsenal that I’m not too bothered by not having an offset that isn’t Mustang-shaped in my life.

One day I’d like to do a take two on an offset like that but I’d probably start with a Jazzmaster. At this point I’m also used to hardtail guitars and feel iffy about the pain that any vibrato system would introduce in maintenance etc.

At this point I’m voting Jazzmaster. Nels Cline/Elvis Costello/Thurstron Moore/Tom Verlaine et al can’t be wrong.

I mean, here is my bias

Jaguars would be my favourite guitar if I could play them. Rowland S. Howard, Gareth Liddiard, and Nicolas Bragg from Destroyer—in all cases you can really hear that it's a tiny guitar being overpowered. Jazzmasters (awesome, my second-favourite Fender) are like a grand piano and Jaguars are like an upright/spinet with shorter strings that you're pounding the shit out of. Sorry, I mean "out of which you are pounding the shit."

Unfortunately anything smaller than Gibson scale is a joke to me past the seventh fret.