Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

[mickeyG]

Hello everybody. I have little situation on my hands with a SD pickup, so please provide some advice:

I have a standard telecaster and what I want is a jb humbucker sound. There is no jb jr for telecaster, and I didn't want to get a lil '59 for fear it would be to midrangey.
So I bought a jb jr (for strat) and had a 'luthier' fit it into the bridge slot of my tele. He glued it to a tele pickup baseplate and replaced the factory pickup.
The tone is precisely what I've been looking for, but there is one big problem: the jb jr is a bit shorter than a tele pickup, so the poles don't align with the strings. This causes the high e string to be about 1-2 mm to the right of the rightmost pole on the pickup, and its volume is much lower as a result. So the high e is much quieter than the other strings. This is especially a problem when playing clean, distortion covers this up (although not completely) with compression.

So what can I do? I love the tone I get with the jb jr, but the volume drop on the high e is intolerable. What tele pickup sounds like a jb jr? Or is there anything I can do (as in mods, I dunno).

Please help.. I'm completely stumped.

 

[jeremy]

Re: Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

welcome to the forum!!


so the low e string lines up with the pole piece? have you tried raising the pole piece under the high e string to compensate for the lack of volume?

 

[Lewguitar]

Re: Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

If the high E doesn't line up but your low E does then your luthier didn't glue the JB JR to the Tele baseplate properly. I always thought Teles and Strats had the same string spacing, and the JB JR is designed for Strat bridge spacing so it seems to me that it should have worked fine. Does it not line up with either row of polepieces? Bummer! Can it be removed, unglued and then moved over a bit on the baseplate and reglued?

 

[mickeyG]

Re: Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.. moving it a mm or two on the baseplate.
Other than that.. what tele pickup sounds like a jb? I'm thinking the lil 59 would be closest

 

[Lewguitar]

Re: Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.. moving it a mm or two on the baseplate.
Other than that.. what tele pickup sounds like a jb? I'm thinking the lil 59 would be closest

Probably the Hot Rails or Lil 59...but try fixing that JB JR. You might like the Jerry Donahue...it's not humbucking but it's kicks butt. Great tone. I prefer it to the JB JR. myself. Lew

 

[mickeyG]

Re: Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

Wouldn't the HotRails be too chunky? I don't want the heavy, agressive, metal-type humbucker sound, what I'm after is precisely what the jb offers: a very detailed high-end, and a not too poignant midrange (think jimmy page, omar rodriguez).
I'm thinking the lil 59 might be closer to that sound.

 

[Lewguitar]

Re: Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

Wouldn't the HotRails be too chunky? I don't want the heavy, agressive, metal-type humbucker sound, what I'm after is precisely what the jb offers: a very detailed high-end, and a not too poignant midrange (think jimmy page, omar rodriguez).
I'm thinking the lil 59 might be closer to that sound.

I don't think the Hot Rails sounds like a heavy metal humbucker...it's a single coil size pickup and no single coil size pickup has the chunk of a full size humbucker. Neither does the JB JR.

The Hot Rails would probably seem a little stronger than the JB JR and the Little 59 would probably seem a little weaker.

 

[poopsmith921]

Re: Help please! Jb jr's and tele's

Isnt the angle on the bridge tele pickup different than the angle on a strat? That might have something to do with the volume drop.