Fender Jag-Stang

The Fender Jag-Stang is the signature Fender model for Kurt Cobain.  He helped design it in the early nineties and it has had two production runs.  The first was produced from 1995 until 2001 and from 2003 until 2006.  It is a conglomeration of custom parts and stock Fender parts pulled from various other Fender models.  The commercial model comes with a humbucker in the bridge position and a single coil pickup in the neck position.  Both are slanted for reasons unknown.  The design is somewhat unfinished in that the body does not have the contour body that it was eventually going to have.  It has a relatively thick neck with a thin nut.  This makes it ideal for the type of grunge rock that it was designed to play.  I also use mine for blues and metal, as it has an extremely wide array of tones that it can achieve.  It can get these tones through the use of two switches.  They each control one of the pickups, and they can reverse the polarity of each pickup.  With the reversal of polarities, you can totally customize the tone of the pickups, creating anything from very full tones to hollow sounding opposite polarities.  It is a pretty cool feature, but one that is very difficult to figure out.  It requires quite a bit of playing around with the switches to get  the subtleties available.  The tremolo is a semi-floating unit that is very stable.  It comes with a single volume and a single tone knob.  The pickups respond well to volume roll-off , but the tone knob is pretty much on or off.  Overall build quality is very good, and fit and finish are impressive.  Mine currently has a hybrid set of .09-.46 strings on it that give just the right amount of tension for my playing style.  It was available in two colors, baby blue and red-orange.  It is highly recommended for fans of tonal diversity, rare guitars, and Kurt Cobain.