Squier Vintage Modified Jaguar: Trade Bait?

I bought my Squire Vintage Modified Jaguar on a weekend while visiting my parents. I had decided that I needed to get out of the house for a little while. Aside from going to the mall, there's not much more to do than visit the music store, which is all the excuse I need to wander around Long and McQuade for an hour. 

This was back in the day when I still knew most of the people who worked there, including the owner. Well, I say the owner; he wasn't the owner anymore, but he WAS the owner, and then the manager prior to his retirement retirement.

At any rate, I went there with my wife and poked around. I saw these Jaguars and Jazzmasters that I had recently watched reviews for on YouTube. Lee Anderton and Rob Chapman had raved about them, except for the bridge, which was the same as the original design and didn't lend itself to bending. But they had a solution: if you ordered a Musicmaster bridge (I'm not sure if that's the model from Allparts anymore), it would fit directly in, and all of a sudden, you had a very, very playable guitar.

This was at a time when the Canadian dollar was pretty strong against the US dollar, so a lot of the stuff we're used to seeing in music stores was priced below MSRP. I seem to recall that this one was listed at $299.

I was a bit flush with cash at the time, because a side hustle was going particularly well, so dropping $300 on a brand new electric guitar that was in Candy Apple Red, and that would give me something to tinker with over the next few weeks seemed like a  good use of moeny.

I ordered the replacement bridge along with some made-in-Japan replacement tuners, which of course I couldn't install myself because the pegs needed to be reamed. Things got more expensive immediately.

I took it to a local luthier, and he reamed it out and then set it up. He was a Jaguar fan himself, and that's where I learned about wrapping the posts in a little bit of duct tape to get a little bit more stability. Yes, it killed the sound a little bit, but I'll take playable and tunable over precisely the right amount of high end, especially when we're talking about "Duncan Design" pickups that weren't particularly good (not bad either, mind). Once I was done with it, it was a good guitar. The short scale made it different than anything else, and at the time, I didn't own any other offsets. It seemed like the right guitar at the right time.

Did it sound as good as any of my other guitars? 

No. 

I can't really recall what I had at the time without looking back at all the posts and figuring out whether I owned this Strat or that Les Paul, but suffice to say it's always been a bit bottom-of-the-barrel.

Over the years, the collection grew, and I found myself playing the Jag less and less. I was given a Made-in-Japan Fender Jazzmaster for my 40th birthday, and about a year prior to that, I had purchased an American Professional Jazzmaster on the used market for $1000. 

That's a fantastic guitar, by the way. I still can't believe that I only paid $1000 for it, given what they're going for now. But remember what I said about the Canadian dollar being strong back when I bought the Squire Vintage Modified Jaguar; the opposite is true nowadays. You're looking at $3K for an American Professional Series instrument, so in that light, $1000 seems like a steal for such a good guitar.

I have other guitars that aren't as good as my best ones, but I still enjoy them. A great example is my Ibanez JEM Junior, which I pick up on a regular basis just because of how different it feels from everything else. The neck is thinner, but the fretboard is wider, so it's really comfortable to play but also feels a bit like a classical guitar thanks to the radius. Do I love how the pickups sound? No, not really. Do I plug it in all that much? No, I don't.

But I pick it up a lot.

I can't say the same for the Squire Vintage Modified Jaguar. It looks cool, it sounds OK; it's a little too bright, I think. The switching is pretty convoluted, and there is no situation I which I can see myself picking that guitar up instead of my Telecaster or one of the Jazzmasters. Having recently bought a real deal Gibson ES335, I've looked at the rest of my collection and thought "I probably don't need all of these guitars."

The problem is that when I look at most of them, I can find reasons not to get rid of them. I have a black Epiphone Les Paul Deluxe, which actually belonged to a dear friend of mine. He just ran out of space, mostly because he has two kids and lives in downtown Toronto, and you just don't have space in that scenario.

I have a Mexican Strat that started life as a Black Top Strat. I modified it pretty heavily, but it was the guitar which inspired the color of my firstborn daughter's first bedroom, and so it reminds me of that, and I can't imagine getting rid of it. Besides, how much would I get? Five hundred or six hundred dollars? 

Then what would I buy? 

That leaves the Jaguar. So I decided I would take a couple of really nice pictures and use all of the filters modern technology allows for to post it for four hundred dollars or trade. I got a lot of offers, none of them were particularly inspiring.

Today though, I had someone local said they wanted it and wanted to pay cash, so now this is very real, and now I'm in a place where I'm worried I'm going to regret selling the Jag in a couple of days. I'm frantically searching for the thing that is going to replace this in my collection. 

Some kind of used-market retail therapy to be certain...

Hold on, you'll say, "weren't you selling this because you had too many guitars?"

Yep, you got me. I lied. It's never about too many guitars; it's about filling out the roster and knowing that that roster is always going to change. 

What don't I have at this moment which would make my collection more "complete"?

I don't have a Flying V or an Explorer, and buying the 335 has cured a little bit of my allergy to Epiphone. God, I love the alliteration there: allergy to Epiphone... English is weird.

I don't have a Casino, and I've always wanted a Casino. I have two Jazzmasters and three Strats, but only one Tele. Do I need a second one? No, this isn't about need; this is about what I like, as it always is.

The other consideration is I'm starting to see amplifiers as equivalent to guitars in terms of their place in the collection. I have three really good amplifiers. Well, at least I think they're really good. I think that my '68 Deluxe Reverb needs a new speaker because a few weeks ago I put it in the Dr. Z Maz 8 back-to-back, and plugged the Z's Celestion into Fender.

I was blown away by how much better it sounded. Now, some of that's probably down to the cabinet, but I would bet that the majority of the improvement is the speaker itself. Four hundred dollars doesn't buy you a lot of amp, though. Doesn't buy you a lot of anything, if we're honest. Suppose I could get a really nice effects pedal, but I've been shying away from effects pedals lately because it's just too much tap dancing. I end up spending more time twisting knobs than actually playing the guitar.

So now I'm scouring Kijiji and Facebook, trying to make a list of things that I could buy in lieu of the Jaguar so that I don't feel as though there's a hole in my collection or that I've made a terrible mistake. And maybe the right answer is to take your money and set up, but if I do that, it'll be one less guitar, and that four hundred dollars will disappear into the expenditures of life. Not that that's a bad thing, but it's certainly less exciting.

I think I'm going to continue looking for a Casino or maybe one of those Godin 5th Ave. hollow bodies. If it had a P90 in my neck, that would be better, and I feel like I'm asking a lot for four hundred dollars. Sure, I could add cash to get that number up, but now I'm just spending money, and this all started because I decided that I had too many guitars.