Fender Jaguar

The Fender Jaguar was introduced in 1962 just as surf music was becoming popular. While surf essentially made the guitar popular it’s likely that the Fender design team was wanting to improve upon the Jazzmaster. To this end, the Jaguar had the same offset waist and dual circuit wiring that the Jazzmaster had. They did decide to go with a shorter scale length, 24 inches, for this guitar. The idea was to make the Jaguar the top of  the Fender product line. However, it didn’t work out that way as the problematic bridge and changing musical tastes in the 1960’s caused many guitarists to stay away from it. It wasn’t until the 1990’s with the arrival of grunge music, most notably Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, brought this guitar back into the spotlight for a moment.

The two critical elements of the Jaguar were the unusual electronics and the Fender Dynamic Vibrato (aka tremolo) system with a rubber string mute.

One of the things that you’ll first notice with the Jaguar is the number of switches, 3 on/off switches on the lower bout and an on/off switch and two roller switches on the upper bout. The roller controls on the upper bout are a presets for the neck pickup only, primarily intended for jazz players to control the tone and volume separately. The switch is to choose between this special circuit or the main circuit on the lower bout. On the lower bout, there’s a selector switch for each pickup and the third one is a switch that has a high pass capacitor that thins out the sound somewhat. The Jaguar has master volume and tone pots and are 1meg pots rather than the usual 250K or 500K found on most other Fender guitars. While many Strat style single coil sized pickups can be shoehorned to fit into a Jaguar you’ll get the best results from a pickup specifically designed for this guitar.

The bridge, which has given unsuspecting guitarists and guitar techs headaches over the years, is the Fender Dynamic Vibrato paired with a rubber mute. The important thing to understand about these features is that they were specifically designed for use with heavy gauge, flatwound, strings. They weren’t intended for use with light gauge strings or for heavy whammy bar wanking out. If you try to rock out with a Jaguar, you should have a good guitar tech do a few simple mods to at least lock down the bridge. Otherwise, you’ll be knocking it out of tune a lot. Kurt Cobain ended up swapping his bridge out for a Gibson style Tune-O-Matic for this reason.

Another common problem with the Jaguar is string buzz. While using flatwounds can cure this, there’s also the option of using a buzz stop or doing more extensive modifications to the guitar. My recommendation is to know what you’re getting when you buy a vintage style Jaguar rather than hacking up the guitar with mods. If your goal is to rock and you like the style of the Jaguar, perhaps you should consider one of the alternative versions of the guitar that are better designed for rock.

Most vintage Jaguars were sunburst since there was an upcharge for other colors and most had to be special ordered. The colors that were available included: black, blonde, burgundy mist, candy apple red, charcoal frost, fiesta red, inca silver, lake placid blue, olympic white, shell pink, shoreline gold, sonic blue and surf green. Other fancy appointments such as binding and a painted headstock were common in different model years but the guitar failed to capture an audience after the initial interest in the early 1960’s.

The original Jaguar had a thirteen year production run from 1962 until 1975. It became popular with alternative musicians during the 1980’s because of its low price as compared to other, more popular, vintage Fender guitars. Groups like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers made the guitar popular in alternative rock circles. This led to reissues of the Jaguar and variations on the Jaguar design in the 1990’s and I’ll be cover them in other articles.

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