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Jazz masters and jaguars have seen a quite comeback recently and are now more popular than ever especially with the hipster indie crowd. If you are a do it yourself-er then instead of buying a cheapo squire infinity, you might want to consider building one of these kits from the fretwire, it’s actually surprisingly good, and I’ll demo it for you and tell you all about it in this unboxing, building, and review.
Now the fretwire actually sells these offset style kits with a few different options, they have an hss, an sss (like a strat) and a p90 version. I opted to try out the p90 version because its more traditional and comes with a jaguar style tremolo, as opposed to the other kits that come with strat style pickup configuration and tremolos. This p90 version is the more expensive of the three at $170, but don’t forget that awesome coupon code that Sam hooked us up with, GUNSNGTRS, which will drop that price down to $160. Thanks again Sam for being an awesome member of our community here. What a bro.
Unboxing it the first thing I noticed was that the body as actually made of 4 pieces of wood, which 2 and 3 piece bodies are totally normal for this kind of kit, 4 pieces seems like a bit much to me. And, while the wood grain in each piece is actually pretty decent, the colors of the woods don’t match, so it looks like it has racing stripes or something. And this would definitely be considered a flaw, and most guitar builders would opt to paint it a solid color to cover it up. But I actually like flawed guitars, I feel like flaws in the wood give it more character, so I’m good with it. But if you’re looking to build a flawless guitar, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
The neck looks really good though, it has great wood grain, it’s nice and straight, and like all the other kits I’ve received from the fretwire, the frets have already been leveled and crowned. But unlike those other kits from the fretwire, this one actually looks like a pretty decent job. Also, the neck and body fit perfectly, a nice snug fit. It came with this beautiful red tortoise pickguard that is really true to the classic jazzmaster styling, as is this tremolo system, like I mentioned before. Lastly it came with two cream colored center mount p90 pickups, and while it’s a really simple wiring with only two pickups, 3 way switch, master volume and master tone, none of it is prewired. So basic soldering skills and the ability to follow a wiring diagram is necessary to complete this build. Speaking of building, the overall build time for me was about 2 hours, again not including any sort of sanding or finishing. And just for kicks, when I was soldering this project, I decided to use the comically small amount of solder that came with the kit to see if it was even enough to finish the wiring. And to my surprise, it actually was. Barely. When I was done I had this much left. And I didn’t make any mistakes along the way. They really don’t leave you much room for error do they?
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