I was going to give this piece the provocative title ‘The Great Pickup Swindle!’, as choice is exactly what we don’t get on so many instruments. Our StewMac offset kit, which we started to put together in the last issue of The Mod Squad, is similarly one-choice with its pair of P-90 soapbars, their position fixed by the open holes in the scratchplate. If you want to fit Jazzmaster or Jaguar-style offset staples, for example, or simply a humbucker at the bridge, you would need to get a new scratchplate made.
But I don’t actually feel swindled, just strangely limited, particularly since this offset kit’s body has a rectangular ‘swimming pool’ rout. This means that, in theory, we could fit numerous styles of pickups, just as long as they are able to be direct-mounted to the body. Of course, we’d then need some kind of adapted scratchplate to hold the volume, tone and output jack on the treble side, and another to hold the toggle switch on the bass-side shoulder.
While I ponder my options, I uncover a more fundamental problem: a Jazzmaster pickup inside its cover is too wide to fit in that rout. It seems like an epic fail by StewMac, as widening that rout by under 2mm would
