Pimping My Ride (And Other Shoegazery Bobbins)

Well, not a particularly Jooky thing to talk about, but it is guitar-like, and I'm sadly all a flutter about it, so here we go.

As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have a bit of a liking for all things offset, with Jazzmasters being the main event of my little mental circus. I am a bit of a grungy shoegazer, it has to be said.

A Cute Jazzmaster Earlier Today

I have a rather lovely, early '90s Made In Japan one, and I love it so.

However, unfortunately, I don't quite love the scratchplate - which is fine and does the job, but is brown tortoise-shell, and I prefer red.

OK, call me King Shallow, but given the amount of time I spend agonising over how Jooky guitars are going to look, well, you can't be surprised by that, can you?

So anyway, I decided to get a new scratchplate. And whilst I was doing that it seemed a shame not to get some lovely creamy aged pickup covers, to match the, err, aged '70s knobs I seemed to acquire from somewhere (ahem).

And while I was doing that I figured that if I'm going to be taking the 'plate off, well, the pickups are really good on the MIJ Jazzmasters, but the neck one on this one seems a bit brighter than normal. Not a big deal, just a touch on the tone knob, but these things niggle, don't they?

A Foto of some cool Jazzmaster Pickups
shamelessly nicked from Mojo Pickups on Ebay

So, I've tried Lollars and Novaks before, and they are fine, but not quite the full ticket, which set me thinking about a review I'd read about Mojo Pickups, so I went-a-looking, and had a chat with Marc who runs them and winds all the pickups and very pleasant he was too. And in the end I decided to go ferrit, as the saying goes.

So anyway, Marc is now winding me a set of his pickups (tweaked to my individual whims and wants) and they should be with me soon. He also sells some gorgeous looking paper in oil capacitors, and one of them is coming too. So I might as well, err, rewire it while I'm at it. (This may be an odyssey in itself, and Homer could prove an accurate name for this wearisome traveller).

But there we are, I'll no doubt talk about this as I go along.

I mentioned Mojo Pickups before as I had been tempted to try their Tele pups for The Dust My Broom One, but Jazzmaster pickups are cool and there is no better place to start. I like dealing with the smaller British winders too. In some ways Bare Knuckle and their like have got a bit big, like Kent Armstrong before them, and it loses that wind-to-order feeling and gets a bit box-shifter-ish. Not that they don't make excellent pickups, they do, but you can't really beat talking to the geezer who is going to do the work, can you? So Mojo, like Catswhisker and Wizard are getting my vote more and more often...

(I won't mention the Jooky factories opening in China and Indonesia, 

best leave that for another day.)

Oh, and you can find Mojo Pickups on Ebay Here or via their web site Here. Well worth a look, methinks.


La la laaaa