Jaguar pickups: 1963 vs. 1964
To stag or not to stag? And what is the correct way of those short pickup claws?
1963, the polepieces are “flat”:
… in 1964, the polepieces were changed to “staggered”:
Note: In both pictures the “sawteeth” claws of the pickups face the wrong** way – factory mounted. :-)
By design**, the two short “teeth” were meant to sit under the treble strings (at the time of the design wound g-strings were common*, hence the four longer teeth, each for a wound string). It would be interesting to hear the differences this makes (if any). I can only guess that the magnetic field is slightly changed, so it should be wider were the “teeth” are shorter, which probably will allow for a less trebly sound. To guess even more, I venture this was meant to even out the tonal difference of wound and plain strings.
**) Yeah, well, stop. It seems that there are many many vintage Jags that came out of the factory this way -- with the "short" claws under the bass strings. If you consider the four longer claws as a tool to enhance - or focus? - the magnetic field under the string, wouldn't it make totally sense that the thinner strings (D-G-H-E) get a boost, while the thick (E-A) strings have enough momentum for the output? This remains a mystery, even today (in 2023!).
To some, the theory with four wound strings having four longer claws and then two plain strings with two shorter claws makes sense - *if* you think about these claws as focussing the breadth of the magnetic field, so that a longer claw makes for a shorter section of the string that gets picked up - resulting in a tighter tone. *then* it would make sense to have the treble strings with a wider magnetic field, so that they are less trebly. Frankly, I don't know what was the original intend, and according to discussions in the web, this question is still unanswered.
*) see the description of strings recommented at that time, taken from the 1965 owner’s manual:
