The Fender Jaguar is a guitar that I had work to make myself fall in love with. Let me explain.

I have done a few videos in the past month on the Jaguar. I now own two of the guitars.

Even after I recently built one, I still did not really like the guitar and thought the Jazzmaster was a far superior guitar. I regularly thought about selling the Jaguars on Reverb.

Playability and the ultimate sound coming out of a guitar are tied together. I have also found that if I do not like the sound coming out of a guitar, I will not enjoy the playing experience. Let’s face it – I love guitars but am not the best player in the world. The last thing I need for my ego is a guitar that makes me sound worse of a player than I really am.

I did not like playing my Jaguar guitars and did not like the sounds that came out of them. Here is what would happen. I would tune the guitar and get it intonated and then go over to my amp and the guitar would no longer be intonated and sound like shit when I played. I was really frustrated. You would not believe how long it took me to record the stupid audio samples for the videos I have done on the Jaguar so far for the channel.

I was curious and determined if I could change my opinion. I would watch players play the Jaguar on YouTube and get great sounds out of the guitar. What the hell was I doing wrong?

I wanted to set aside some time and just focus on the two Jag’s that I owned and see if I could find the root of the problems and make them sound better.

Just a note – searching online you can find discussions on forums and many videos on the same subject I am covering in this video. There is a whole industry of aftermarket bridge and tremolo manufacturers that have designed products that fix the very problems I will point out. I did not discover anything new and am not blazing a trail for others to follow. I like to keep my guitars in original state when it comes to bridges, tremolos, and tuners for the most part if I can get away with it. This is just me explaining how I finally came to the decision that if I left the guitar in an as designed state, it just would not work properly for me and how I play.

The first thing I found was the bridge is flawed and not well designed. The saddles have thin and inadequate grooves cut into them so if you are playing higher gauge strings the strings will not sit in the grooves and as a result tend to move around while you play. This is a problem when trying to keep the guitar in a stable state of tuning. I have read that this is a problem for heavy handed players. Players that hit the strings hard. I am thinking with my grizzly paws that I most definitely fit into this category of player.

Next observation, the bridge posts are much smaller than the cups that they are inserted into and as a result the bridge can move back and forth under the strings. This reaps havoc on intonation and tuning. I do not fix this problem in this video. I did however not experience as much of an issue after making my modifications. I have read and seen how folks will place something in the cup that keeps the bridge posts from moving as much. Also replacing the bridge and cups with a bridge system that has tight tolerances would also fix the problem. Something I may do in the future.

I wondered why I was not having the same issues with my Jazzmaster guitars. When I looked at my Jazzmaster guitars I realized that I had either mustang bridges installed or like on the J Macis guitars have a tune-o-matic bridge installed. These bridges seemed to fix or reduce the problems I was experiencing on the Jag.

I ordered a couple Fender mustang bridges. The difference the mustang bridge presents in design is that has a single deep slot cut into each of the saddles that keeps the string in place. The string rests in the channel and does not for the most part pop out. This for me immediately fixed the string slippage. I could tell the difference right from the get-go when I was installing new strings.
Not to really fix the problem I was experiencing but since I had one and I had the strings off of the guitar I installed a true Fender US made tremolo with the locking mechanism.

You may remember that when I built the guitar, I tried to install a set of the Fender American Vintage 65 Jaguar pickups and I had a bad pickup out of the box. I sent the pickups back and got a refund. While I was looking for a replacement set on Reverb I found a set of Lindy Fralin Jaguar pickups at a great price. I figured if I was going to get great sound out of my Jaguar installing a set of Fralin pickups would not be bad investment. The Fralin Jaguar pickups are advertised as being beefier and louder sounding than most other Jaguar pickups.