Replacement Humbucker suggestions for Fender Player Jaguar

joolsa

I've got one of these recently from eBay, on a whim. It's a great playing guitar, once setup, and the next single coil is decent. I'm not getting on with the bridge humbucker. When not split it's really honky and nasal. When split it's fine in the middle position and sort-of ok in the bridge position. What do you suggest as a replacement humbucker? My ideal is that the middle position is good when split and the humbucker is great alone, just not too nasal. I don't mind the humbucker being higher output than the neck. Alternatively I'd be ok with a humbucker that didn't split as long as it and the middle position worked. I've tried raising / lowering the existing pickup and screws, but it doesn't get to where I want to go

Dave_Mc

joolsa said:

What do you suggest as a replacement humbucker? My ideal is that the middle position is good when split and the humbucker is great alone, just not too nasal.

The problem is those two things are possibly working against each other... usually to get a decent split you want a hotter humbucker, but then a hotter humbucker is usually more nasal (everything else being equal, at least). That being said, there are things you can do to compensate, but whether it's enough...

You can use a resistor to put a bit of the second coil into the split sound. That makes it not as weak and means you can get away with a lower output humbucker. Probably alnico 5 if you don't want too nasal, and PAF or hot PAF output.

Something like a Duncan Custom 5 is pretty scooped even though it's fairly hot, but I've never tried its split tone. Or you could go with a ceramic fairly hot humbucker to avoid the nasal thing but also have enough grunt for the split sound. As long as you like the sound of a ceramic pickup.

There are other fancier pickups with one rod magnet coil and one slug coil to sort of get the best of both worlds, but there's still a bit of compromise probably with both sounds...

Funkfingers

The Duncan '59/Custom humbucker has two wildly mismatched coils. The idea is that splitting to the 8k stud poles coil makes a decent volume balance with your neck position pickup.

The Oil City Pickups Creature model works along similar principles.

For maximum versatility, consider the SD P-Rails Hot pickup and Triple Shot mounting surround. That would provide four sonic options from the bridge position pickup.

joolsa

Thanks when you say this:
> As long as you like the sound of a ceramic pickup.
how would you describe their sound? 

ICBM

I would pick something along the lines of the Duncan Screamin' Demon - medium output but splits well, with a choice of different mismatched coils. The '59/Custom should be even more so, although I haven't tried it myself.

The classic grunge Jaguar pickups would be the Duncan JB or DiMarzio Super Distortion, but I think those will be too far down the hot/nasal route in that guitar, if you don't like the stock pickup. (Which is probably intended to sound something like those.)

guitargeek62

Not a HB but I had a great result recently replacing the stock bridge pickup in my TVL sig with a bargainalicious ‘Toltec Pickups JM Fat’ model. It’s (apparently) based on the Novak Fat JM p’up, and sounds brilliant with gain whilst balancing very well alongside the neck Fender Pure Vintage ‘65 JM pickup. 

No affiliation, but I’d buy these again:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/276013194079

Funkfingers

guitargeek62 said:

‘Toltec Pickups JM Fat’ model. It’s (apparently) based on the Novak Fat JM p’up. 

Somebody I know has - and likes muchly - that Novak pickup in his Fender mk1 American Original JM.

Unfortunately, the OP's Player Jaguar has HS pickups. I don't remember whether Novak offers his Fat JM pickup in a regular humbucker format.

joolsa

Yes, I do like JM pickups in my JM, and ideally I'd avoid altering the pick guard in my Jag. I'd actually like to stay in humbucker land for this, but just not the very nasal end of things. From what everyone's said I should be aiming at at PAF-like or scooped and avoiding classic high gain types e.g. JB or Super Distortion.

Dave_Mc

joolsa said:

Thanks when you say this:
> As long as you like the sound of a ceramic pickup.
how would you describe their sound? 

You sort of have to judge each specific one on its own merits, because there's a lot than can be done to the tone in addition to the magnets, but as a very rough rule of thumb with ceramic, you get more treble, a tighter bass, and a bit of a "metallic edge" to the tone (at least with the usual caveat of "everything else being equal"). It's not quite as organic-sounding as alnico, everything else being equal, and sounds a bit "metal" (the music genre, I mean), if that makes sense. But the upshot is that you get a bit more power to make the splits sound better, without the nasal honk (or at least as much of the nasal honk) you often get with overwound alnico humbuckers.

Basically a stronger magnet sort of "adds back in" (or maybe more accurately, "doesn't lose as quickly") the frequencies which tend to be lost as the turn count goes up.

(Though as I said with the Custom 5, for some reason it doesn't seem to do it. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just haven't tried enough humbuckers with its spec!)

@funkfingers That's a good call about the custom '59 hybrid, Creature and P-Rails, but I haven't tried them!

ICBM said:

The classic grunge Jaguar pickups would be the Duncan JB or DiMarzio Super Distortion, but I think those will be too far down the hot/nasal route in that guitar, if you don't like the stock pickup. (Which is probably intended to sound something like those.)

Yeah it's ages since I've tried a Super Distortion, but the JB in particular is almost the archetypical nasal and hot bridge humbucker I would say... 

I agree with @guitargeek62 that Toltecs are great, and can be got for very attractive prices on Ebay. He doesn't often have humbuckers up for cheap, though, unfortunately (and the ones he does are usually vintage-style i.e. unsplittable).

joolsa said:

Yes, I do like JM pickups in my JM, and ideally I'd avoid altering the pick guard in my Jag. I'd actually like to stay in humbucker land for this, but just not the very nasal end of things. From what everyone's said I should be aiming at at PAF-like or scooped and avoiding classic high gain types e.g. JB or Super Distortion.

Yeah I think so. If you know you want scooped (though it's worth bearing in mind that that might be overkill- if your current pickup is nasal/honky/too middy, something which is merely fairly flat in the mids may be enough) you probably want alnico 5 alongside a PAF or hot-PAF type of wind and output. But as I said above, ceramic is sort of a way, if the wind's not too hot, to get a bit more power while also maintaining a similar (but not identical) tone to a lower output alnico 5 humbucker.

The other thing I always say- and this does depend on exactly what you're after- is that, assuming your main priority is the humbucker tone (for most people it is, but not always), I'd just get the humbucker whose tone you know you want (assuming you already know that!) and put up with the split tones, using the resistor trick to make the split tones as good as possible.

EDIT: Oof that's a really long post. Don't make the mistake of thinking that means I know more than the people who have posted above who have posted less. It's the opposite. They know a lot more than I do. 

Creed_Clicks

I'd get rid of the split option, and put a classic humucker or a H sized WRHB and maybe use the upper pickguard switch for series/parallel or in phase, out of phase. Maybe put a 4 way switch on the bottom pickup selector.

joolsa

Yep, still not sure if I should go for something I can split or not. To answer dave_mc : no I don’t know what humbuckers I like. Mostly I like single coils, but I fancy a bridge hb for a change. I just know what I don’t like! 

Funkfingers

joolsa said:

still not sure if I should go for something I can split or not.

IMO, you should.

joolsa said:

Mostly, I like single coils but I fancy a bridge hb for a change. 

Also, your guitar's pickguard happens to have a humbucker-sized cut-out at the bridge/Treble position.


Good news. Several manufacturers offer replacement pickups that amount to two Stratocaster-sized units, mounted side by side, on a humbucker baseplate. 

Duncan The Mag, Oil City Brassknuckle, several flavours of Lace Dually, Bare Knuckle Blackhawk, blah, blah.



NOTE: Check the string spacing at the bridge of your guitar. This will determine whether you require regular rather than "F" spaced polepieces.

Dave_Mc

joolsa said:

Yep, still not sure if I should go for something I can split or not. To answer dave_mc : no I don’t know what humbuckers I like. Mostly I like single coils, but I fancy a bridge hb for a change. I just know what I don’t like! 

Yeah that's the problem! There definitely comes a point where you've done all the research you can, and you just have to bite the bullet and buy something and hope it's what you want.

Do you have a multimeter? If you do, that would at least get us the resistance of the stock pickup, and we could make an educated guess as to how it sounds with that figure...

And yeah I agree with @Funkfingers about the split thing- I don't always use them all that much, but I'd miss having splits at least on guitars which suit them- usually Fendery guitars and/or guitars with a mix of humbuckers and single coils like yours.

TTBZ

I like the Duncan Custom Custom in a Fender, really fills it out. Could be a bit too fat for certain styles but as a general mid output rock pickup it's great imo. The magnet can be easily swapped to get the other variations in the Custom line too, ceramic for the Custom and alnico 5 for the Custom 5.

Funkfingers

+1 for the SD Custom 5 in an alder bodied guitar.

A good quality A500k volume pot would be a good compromise. (The Jag circuit normally uses 1Meg pots.)

joolsa

Yep, will have to bite the bullet sooner or later. The spec on the guitar claims 500k pots and the HB is Alnico 3 12.8k. I will try and measure it later.  

joolsa

Measuring the pickup across the guitar lead gives 12.6k, which I think makes it 12.3k in parallel with a 500k volume pot. 

ICBM

joolsa said:

Measuring the pickup across the guitar lead gives 12.6k, which I think makes it 12.3k in parallel with a 500k volume pot. 

Other way round - 12.9K. Well within the expected tolerance/instrumentation error if it’s meant to be 12.8K.

Dave_Mc

joolsa said:

Yep, will have to bite the bullet sooner or later. The spec on the guitar claims 500k pots and the HB is Alnico 3 12.8k. I will try and measure it later.  

That's interesting. That's fairly hot but not excessively so- but a fair bit hotter than a PAF, at least assuming it's 43 AWG wire. I wonder is the alnico 3 affecting it? I've only tried low output alnico 3 humbuckers...

joolsa

Thanks for all the suggestions. Thinking about it I might have been barking up the wrong tree bin terms of which humbuckers to get. I like mostly like single coils, but fancy having a bridge humbucker again. When I cross out the guitarists I like that use EMGs (I want some thing that interacts with fuzz) and Duncan JBs (too like what I'm trying to get away from) I'm pretty much left with Slash and Jimmy Page. So maybe I should be heading down the PAF/Slightly Hotter PAF/Slash's Pickups route and not worry about coil taps. Something to ponder on while I'm away over Easter.