Re: Can you believe what our President has done now?
Ayrton, the Jaguar is best approached a bit differently than yer typical Fender Strat or Tele. It behaves more like one might use active electronics. You start in the middle, and move the controls up or down as needed.
"Home base" (i.e. all controls dimed) on a Jag is *extremely* bright when in the lead circuit. The pots are 1M pots, with old school light-wound Fender single coils. That is (saying it again for emphasis), it starts out *extremely* bright. Therefore the tone control can be run turned down quite a bit as your base tone, and then can be turned up OR down as needed. You also get a more usable amount of volume rolloff before you start losing too much treble. So the Jag tends to get run with controls not dimed, much more often than a Strat or a Tele would.
The lead circuit has 1M volume and 1M tone, both standard taper, and access to either pickup (or both pickups in parallel). The rhythm circuit gives you neck pickup only (no pickup switching) with 1M linear volume and 50K linear tone. All you are really doing by switching to the rhythm circuit is choosing a different tone pot. The volume pot taper is different too, but that doesn't affect most people in real-world use of the rhythm circuit.
Because the Jag is naturally so bright due to the old style Fender single coils piped into 1M pots, the neck pickup with controls dimed has a tone that is equivalent in brightness to the bridge pickup on most guitars. Switching to the rhythm circuit with the controls dimed is really nothing but switching from a 1M tone pot to a 50K tone pot. It just gives you a slightly treble attenuated variant of the neck pickup. It's still plenty bright IMO, and sometimes I roll back the tone a bit even on the rhythm circuit.
Basically, the way I approach the Jag is that I don't switch pickups that often. I just stay on the neck pickup most of the time, and switch between lead and rhythm circuits for my two main tones, and use the strangle switch to de-mud the neck pickup when on the lead circuit. You have three great tones right there, just like a Strat, but without ever using the bridge pickup. The "extra" 4th tone to me is lead circuit, bridge pickup. That is a stinging, piercing, crunch tone that is great when driving an amp. If I like the sting, but it gets too flubby due to too much distortion, I hit the de-mud switch.
It's a guitar that is based more around "presets" than a Strat or Tele. The tone control offer you quite a lot of variety for tweaking the presets, and you can switch between them relatively quickly.
The Jazzmaster differs in that: 1) It's full scale, 2) It's lead circuit volume pot is linear taper (leaving the lead circuit tone pot as the only standard taper pot on the guitar), and 3) It does not have a strangle switch.
But I think the Jaguar is one of the only guitars where I like 'both on,' really crisp and even tone. Though by default I gravitate to the neck pickup for most things on my Jaguar. The bridge's place is basically surfy leads for me. Right now I have my pickups quite low but I've had them pretty high and everywhere between in the past, don't really think it makes or breaks it either way.
