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Fender Vintage Bridge Question

#21
+1

jags and jazzmasters were a terrible design for anything but really heavy strings and a light touch; mustang saddles and increased shim angles help, but they're still shall we say "quirky".

no bearing at all on how the old threaded-rod bass bridge behaves.
 
#22
thank you for the quick answers. glad to hear it is probably not going to be a problem.

yes, i replaced the jaguar bridge with a mustang bridge, raised it slightly and put 11s on it. no problems at all ever since. that was the reason why i made plans of replacing the bridge on the jazz bass in the first place.

so it seems the only things i am going to do to that beauty (it is in sonic blue :hyper:) is a tort pickguard and a couple of seymour duncan antiquities.
 
#23
walterw said:
+1

jags and jazzmasters were a terrible design for anything but really heavy strings and a light touch; mustang saddles and increased shim angles help, but they're still shall we say "quirky".

no bearing at all on how the old threaded-rod bass bridge behaves.
Click to expand...

Well, I don't agree. The owner of the shop I managed has been playing one of two Jazzmasters since 1960. He hipped me to Mustang saddles around '74, and he plays with 9s or 10s without rattles or strings popping. He does have a very light touch.

Mine worked best for me with 11s, but that was more based on how it sounded, not bridge issues. And I don't think 11s are "really heavy".

YMMV...

Not so much quirky as just a different approach to set up. Certainly for me personally, the Jag/JM trem is better than a Strat.

And again, has nothing to do with the threaded saddles.

John
 
#24
OT, but yeah, we're on opposite sides of the fence on this one :)

strat trems were designed to sustain as much as possible, while jazz/jag trems were deliberately designed to not sustain.

the brilliance of the tele, strat, and the first few basses was that leo listened to his field testers, to his employee/players like freddie tavares and the like; by the time he got to the jazzmaster, the "engineer geek" got the better of him and some others, and features began to appear that seemed neat on paper but were useless in the real world, like the switchable "rhythm circuit" that all the players ignored, or even the very idea of a jazzmaster with its humming single coils, which all the real jazz guys ignored for their humbucker-equipped gibson hollowbodies.

they found some purchase in surf music, but it wasn't until the later '70s punk movement that the "wrongness" of the jazzmaster was appreciated by players looking to poke a finger in the eye of "good" music.
 

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