Lollar Pickups Blog

Welcome to the Lollar Pickups Blog, where we share in-depth information and stories about the pickups we build.

The Mystery of the ‘59 Jazzmaster Tone

The mystery of the ‘59 Jazzmaster tone.

I still see discussions on internet forums about whether the wood in an electric guitar has any effect on its tone, or if it’s all in the pickup. There are some people who insist the instrument itself makes no difference in its tone.

There was a good series of articles a few years ago in the Guild of American Luthiers quarterly magazine about how just the body shape of a solid body electric guitar affects nodal patterns of vibration at different frequencies—just the shape of the body!

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Welcome To The DULLhouse

We get asked all the time, “Why does my old pickup sound dull?” There are many reasons the tone can suffer on vintage pickups.

These p'ups aren't just *playing* dead... They're dead!
These p’ups aren’t just *playing* dead. They’re actually dead!

We can’t resurrect or improve every beaten, tired, old pickup that we come across. Some of them, like the ones seen above, are just too far gone. Only a complete rebuild, with brand new parts could bring them back to life, but at that point, you may as well just replace it! You can’t shine a turd, as they say — and even if you could, you’d still just have a shiny turd. But, just maybe, your dull sound isn’t the turd you thought it was, so in this edition, we’ll address the possible causes and potential solutions.

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The Genuine Lollar Experience

Hi Lollar fans! We sometimes get requests to verify the authenticity of Lollar pickups, whether its a set that pops up on eBay, or a used guitar that is said to be stocked with our stuff. Sometime in 2003 or 2004 we standardized how our pickups were marked, and it is still done the same today. The only way to know for sure that you have a genuine Lollar pickup is to check the bottom and look for the proper markings. We label them in a few different ways, from humbuckers to Strats… there are certain things to look for to insure authenticity.

CURRENT PRODUCTION:

HUMBUCKERS: All our humbuckers have tags screwed to the bottom and are stamped with “LOLLAR IMPERIAL” followed by the year, and if it is a neck or a bridge. Color is important as well… a black label is standard wind, grey is a Low Wind, and red is a High Wind. The name of the builder will be initialed in the right bottom corner.

humbucker

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Best Selling Lollar Pickups – Jazzmaster & Single Coil for Humbucker Rout

This is the fifth article in our series about best selling Lollar pickups. In this article we’ll talk about some of our best selling items that can’t be classified among the main categories of pickups like strat, tele, and humbucker style pickups.

Lollar Jazzmaster Pickups:

Lollar Jazzmaster style pickups are a consistent favorite. Overall the Lollar Jazzmaster style pickups have a nicely detailed treble and a bit more midrange and bass when compared to a strat style single coil. They also have a very responsive dynamic range.

As you may already know, the size and shape of a pickup coil affect the quality of the tone it will produce. For example, the Jazzmaster coil is very short (1/8″) but very wide. This gives it more surface area and allows the pickup to sense the vibrations of a longer length of the strings. This is part of why they have their own unique tone qualities. To read even more about the unique properties of our Jazzmaster pickups, follow this link to an earlier Lollar pickups blog about Jazzmaster pickups and the Jazzmaster guitar.

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Jazzmaster Pickups and the Fender Jazzmaster Guitar – Part 3

One of the significant differences between Jazzmasters and other Fenders is that the main tone and volume controls use 1 Meg ohm pots. When set on 10, these pots do not roll off much signal. The result is more high end and presence than you are use to hearing on an electric guitar. The extra treble can be annoying if you use an amp that can reproduce high end treble (like a Blackface Fender amp). On Fender tweed amps that extra treble is nowhere near as noticeable.

So the trick to getting a good tone with the Lollar Jazzmaster pickup is to roll either the tone or volume down a click or two. This will roll off the extreme high end. (I prefer using the volume) The idea is to roll it a minimal amount—far enough to affect the tone level, but not too far to actually start hearing a volume drop. If done in this way, the tone will change long before the volume is affected. Using the volume control this way will leave treble in reserve if you need it occasionally to cut through a mix. On tweed amps if you are pushing them pretty hard you can leave the volume on 10. Another option is to replace the volume and tone pots with a lower value pot. The 500K would probably have about the same tone as a one Meg pot on 8. I personally like the one Meg pots, so I have never tried other values to determine what works.

Everyone wants to know what the black switches on the upper bout do. There is one slider switch and two rollers. The slider switch defeats every pickup selection except the neck pickup alone. Once the slider switch is activated only the neck pickup functions, and the main 3-way switch for the pickups will no longer work. When the guitar is in the neck-only mode, the two rollers act as an additional volume and tone for the neck pickup. These allow you to preset a volume and tone level different than your main volume and tone controls. You can play normally with the main controls working… put it in the bridge pickup position with full volume for a solo then hit the slider switch and it drops you into the neck pickup with whatever volume and tone you have preset with the rollers. It’s an interesting idea but I have never found much use for it.

Thanks very much for reading our three part series on Jazzmaster style pickups and the Fender Jazzmaster guitar.  We hope it has been informative.  Follow this link to see more details on our Lollar Jazzmaster pickups.

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