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Saturday, March 14, 2026

Fender Jaguar Alt wiring

 Recently I acquired a nice Classic Player Jaguar that had been modified in a few ways.

The orignal pickups were gone and replaced with Bareknuckle Mule pickups (or so I was told).
Curiously,when measured they were way too hot and I believe they are actually a set of  Holy Divers.

These are very high output pickups and a nightmare in my practice space which has very bad EMI in all directions.

Anyway, the other mod was a simple toggle like the Cobain has and the rythm circuit had been disconnected. The toggle switch was low wuality and the neck wouldn't stay engaged.
I was also curious to see how the new pickups would fare with the original wiring schematic.

The coils are split via 50kohm pots, which I found introduces a lot of noise and cuts off the top end.
I bought some 1mohm replacements that were advertised as Jazzmaster/Jaguar roller pots, but they don't fit the roller whels! Anyway, I made do with the splits. The tone was fine but the hum is unbearable.

Furthermore when all pickups are off, there is a persistent hum that is caused by the pickups not being shunted to ground when in the off position.




I remedied this by changing the wiring scheme to something more sensible. I'm probably not the first to do it this way, but the solution is wholly my own (excuse the jank drawing, or not).




That hum issue has now been rectified and bypassing the coil split reduces it a bit too.
Bareknuckle reccomend a 550kohm pot for the coil split but I can't find those with the apropriate shaft diamaeter.

I'm pretty happy with the tone overall, but I'm looking at going for a more traditional PAF style with lower output. Hopefully that reduces the ambient hum even more.



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