Rowland tribute Jaguar

This is a long-term project that came to me in a bag and has been here at the workshop being worked on when I had spare time, which isn't that often at the moment. It was a bunch of parts from different manufacturers which you would think shouldn't be hard to fit together being all copies of parts from Fender guitars, but these "kits" rarely just fall together. 

The body and neck are Asian parts and like a lot of these cheap parts are actually fairly well made and finished, especially for the price. Of course, they need some work if you want them to play well, but when assembled with some care you can make fairly well playing and sounding guitars from these parts.

My friend Tone wanted this as a tribute to Rowland S. Howard and had collected most the parts and applied the decal and then passed the lot onto me to assemble and fit one of my Tymexar circuits into the guitar. Rowland was famous for using an MXR Distortion + into a Fender Twin so this inbuilt circuit just added another nerdy layer to the tribute idea.

I did a dry run of fitting the neck and checking the bridge was in the right place. The neck fit was great and the bridge holes mostly lined up fairly well, but the bridge post holes were drilled for a Tune-O-Matic bridge and Tone wanted an offset bridge, but at least the holes were approximately in the right place for the short scale Jaguar neck.

I rounded off the fretboard edges as it was like running your hand down a razor blade, and did a fret dress and polish. The frets were fairly neat and level, but it would have been an issue playing it straight out of the box.

Then I had to think about where and how to fit the distortion circuit. Tone was keen to keep the standard look, and the jag has plenty of switches and knobs to choose from. Initially I was going to fit the PCB in the Vol/Tone control cavity and the battery under the 3 lower switches. This would have meant LOTS of wire running from one end of the body to the other and back again, several times. I had decided to use the original pots and switch on the top control plate so the obvious place for the PCB was under the scratchplate approximately in the middle between all three plates.

I routed a small hollow under the plate and drilled bigger holes for the wiring to go through to all the cavities. I ran shielded wire to each pot for effect volume and distortion but then realized that I really wanted the effect at the end of the chain between the pots and output jack, so it acted like a normal effects pedal. This meant running the passive and active signal all the way from the output jack to the top plate.

I instead opted for the effects ON/OFF switch to be the original choke switch on the lower 3 switch plate, so I had less wire for space and noise. 

This left the switch on the top plate free for something else. I was listening to some Rowland while working on it and there are some tracks that sounds like he runs the distortion lower with the treble down for leads of riffs within songs, so I messed around with some ideas and fitted a "choke switch" to the distortion pot on the effect circuit. This allows you to run the distortion high and switch in a lower output, less trebly (never a bad thing on the Dist + circuit) version of the distortion, somewhat emulating Rowlands tone in these parts.

I don't usually shield guitars but with this much gain running around I thought I would to try and tame the noise a little. With everything soldered in it was then just a matter of massaging the parts to fit. The metal plates and scratchplate were all genuine Fender and needed to be moved around until they fitted as well as possible.  The battery is under the vol and tone pots and the output jack is a stereo one so you're not draining the battery when it's not plugged in.

It actually plays well and sounds amazingly good for the sum of its parts. Like I say, if you put care and time into assembling parts like this you can get yourself a fairly nice guitar. This is a pretty cool Rowland tribute guitar being just a little bit cooler with his distortion pedal built in with no obvious signs of it being there. It's fun the play and looks very cool. What more could you want?