OTM Jazzmaster is here to stay...
Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 5:39 am
I took the plunge on the 1999 CIJ I posted about before. Sure enough it's not Sherwood Green but has all of the charm, and some.
A bit more bangs and bumps than I'd normally appreciate, though I always like to play the heck out of a well set up Jazzmaster instead of babying one. Indonesian guy with a few too many expensive instruments sold it too me, and wouldn't budge on the price (a tad steeper than I normally would have paid for a used CIJ instrument), but I figured an OTM Jazzo with very little fret wear is enough of a rarity to warrant a minor splurge that I could justify with the selling of a few others in the collection. I shimmed the neck up five business cards thick and tweaked the bridge a bit, and the funky saddles/bridge are doing much better than I had anticipated. SD Antiquity IIs are being contemplated as the primary switchout, as I want this guy to sound a lot different from the ol' trusty sunburst, which is practically overwound P90ish in character with those tall Strat bobbins underneath the covers pumping out 13.5k ohms of angry jingle jangle.
Put on the "old sweaty t-shirt" formerly white guard that's been sitting around, and despite its shrinkage that made fitting around pickups a bit of a shoehorn job, it looks much nicer than the all-too-white guard it came with. I have a feeling that both red tort and gold anodized will be just as charming in its stead.
More to follow, blurry iPhone picture collage for now...
A bit more bangs and bumps than I'd normally appreciate, though I always like to play the heck out of a well set up Jazzmaster instead of babying one. Indonesian guy with a few too many expensive instruments sold it too me, and wouldn't budge on the price (a tad steeper than I normally would have paid for a used CIJ instrument), but I figured an OTM Jazzo with very little fret wear is enough of a rarity to warrant a minor splurge that I could justify with the selling of a few others in the collection. I shimmed the neck up five business cards thick and tweaked the bridge a bit, and the funky saddles/bridge are doing much better than I had anticipated. SD Antiquity IIs are being contemplated as the primary switchout, as I want this guy to sound a lot different from the ol' trusty sunburst, which is practically overwound P90ish in character with those tall Strat bobbins underneath the covers pumping out 13.5k ohms of angry jingle jangle.
Put on the "old sweaty t-shirt" formerly white guard that's been sitting around, and despite its shrinkage that made fitting around pickups a bit of a shoehorn job, it looks much nicer than the all-too-white guard it came with. I have a feeling that both red tort and gold anodized will be just as charming in its stead.
More to follow, blurry iPhone picture collage for now...
As for the non-aesthetic side of things, so far I'm the most surprised how nice that 10-46s feel/sound with the neck shim, although I'm very much used to banging chords out like a madman on 11-49s. This thing be a keepah either way.
