Just for fun – Jazzmaster pickups

You might remember I tried my hands at pickup winding a while ago (was it more than a year ago already?) creating a set of pickups for my Jazzmaster. Or maybe I never posted that, but anyway.

With some major help from my friends I finally got around to do a proper pickup comparison! And here’s the result:

The setup:

• Three different Jazzmasters
  • (J) A japanese Fender Jazzmaster (CIJ) with stock japanese pickups.
  • (S) My own japanese Fender Jazzmaster (CIJ) with custom pickups as mentioned above (see lovely picture, it’s the left one).
  • (A) A modern AVRI Fender Jazzmaster with stock pickups.
• No effects, guitar straight to amp (happened to be the one I most recently built, which, in my subjective opinion, sounds just great). The amp is connected to a 1×12 open-back cabinet with a G12H element.
• A Soundelux U195 microphone straight to a CI2 Steinberg interface for recording.

The result:

Note: No post-processing effects were used, to retain the actual sound as much as possible, but all samples have been trimmed down and given a light touch-up to attenuate excessive fret noise spikes (equally for all samples).

Neck pickups only:

(J):

(S):

(A):

Middle position/both pickups at the same time:

(J):

(S):

(A):

Bridge pickups only:

(J):

(S):

(A):

Credits:

• All guitar playing by Ronny Yttrehus of Captain Gone.
• Recording engineer: Jon Bjørnstad, also of Captain Gone.
• Minor editing and post processing by myself.