I bought this guitar a week ago with every intention of doing the whole Local H thing to it. On this guitar, I wanted the bass pickup to capture only the EA&D strings.
The plan wasn't to go too crazy with it, then in the end it's turned out to be way better than I expected.
Maybe I should start at the beginning though.
I stopped into Guitar Center to check out what cheap guitars they had to use as the base for the project and came across the Squirer Jag. I've never bought a Squier before, but as soon as I played it I was kind of smitten. The bridge on it is a total piece of shit, the rest of the build on the other hand seemed pretty descent and I may be crazy, but I love the bridge pickup in it. After goofing around with it for a few minutes at the guitar shop I bought it along with a Boss Super Octave pedal.
When I got it home I played it through my JCM 800 and confirmed that I do indeed love the sound of the bridge pickup and the neck felt pretty good too. Also the bridge was still a piece of shit. After about 20 minutes of dicking around I tore it apart and was surprised to see that it was routed like an HH Jag (mostly).
I had an Mustang bridge with the tremolo laying around and I've always wanted a Jag with one on it, so the first order of business was to figure out how to get it on there. The post spacing doesn't match up from the stock to the Mustang, so out of laziness I filled the post holes with 2 part epoxy and redrilled for the new bridge thimbles. When it came to routing the trem, I have limited tools for doing any kind of wood working, but do have a rotozip and a dremel tool. I hacked the shit out of this thing with the rotozip and tried unsuccessfully to clean it up with the dremel. It all works fine although under the trem plate is a big mess.
Next was to figure out the placement of the bass pickup. Again I used the rotozip to cut away some wood around the neck pickup hole. With a piece of scrap pickguard material I could mount a 2 pole Mustang Bass pickup to it and move it around until I found the sweet spot. I taped the scrap piece to the original pickguard, so I knew where to cut it. Using a square piece of tort pickguard I made a piece to permanently mount the pickup to and cut the original guard to fit it.
Now it was time to wire it up and this is where I ran into problems. The goal was to use a stereo ring/tip/sleeve jack for the output and use a stereo cable to a splitter box to go to the amps. The guitar would be on the tip, bass on the ring and they would share a common ground on the sleeve. It seemed so simple and I ran the pickup wires to the stock switch after separating the solder points on it and metered it out to make sure it would send two seperate sets of signals from it and it did. From the switch they went to the stock volume/tone pots, then out to the jack. It was all working pretty good for the most part, but there was some kind of signal bleed going on. It was kind of faint, but the bass pickup was coming through the guitar amp and vice versa on the other side. It was enough to color the sound and there was a shit ton of noise. I must have pulled it apart a dozen times to check what was going on and that meant pulling the strings and the entire pickguard off every time. Finally I said piss on it and did more cutting to the guard so I could mount Jag plates, thus not having to restring it every time.
As it sits right now I'm using 2 outputs for it. The guitar is on the Jag plate and the bass is the Strat jack. The upper control is volume/tone with an on/off switch for the bass and its not connected in any way to the guitar circuit (not even ground). I figured it would buzz like a motherfucker, but I'll be damned if it isn't totally quiet. The guitar controls are a little more involved. It's got a new stacked pot for volume/tone because I wanted the Jazz Bass knobs and I burned out both of the ones that came with it from running my soldering iron too hot. next to it is a mini pot for spin-a-splitting. I used a mini so it would fit in the cavity without having to do any more cutting. The three switches are - pickup on/off - Series humbucker/split coil and the last switch turns the spin-a-split on/off.
It sounds fucking glorious and I can't get over how much I like playing it. I still want to figure out how to run it with a single cable out and the plan is going to be keeping the guitar jack on the Jag plate so I can use it as a regular guitar, then making the Strat jack a multi output by using maybe a midi cable to keep the signals separated. Dunno yet.
The whole thing took me about a week to do and it was a fun and frustrating project in which I learned a few things: I'm not good at wood working at all, cutting pickguards with a dremel sucks balls (totally fucked up the switch plate hole) and even if I hadn't bought this guitar specifically to butcher, I have a new appreciation for the Squire stuff. Everything on it that was stock was pretty good quality (with the exception of the bridge).
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...... and just for FYI the bridge pick up in that geet is a Korean made Duncan JB trembucker... the neck one is the Jazz
