Seymour Duncan Hot Jazzmaster Silencer review: an awesome feat of pickup design
$278, seymourduncan.com
Confession time. I play high-gain music without a noise gate. While this is the sort of sin that can get a chair thrown at you in certain circles, I do manage to make it work. I’m not doing chuggy modern metal, so I require very little of the stop/start percussiveness that a gate can afford. I just turn off my gain pedals with a looper if I want to change to a clean sound or stop the feedback.
With that said, my lack of a noise gate does mean that my single-coil loaded Jazzmaster isn’t really ever played live. Very loud feedback is very much a part of the music I want to play – very loud mains hum, less so. But! Seymour Duncan may have the solution here – the Silencer Jazzmasters, a newly designed noiseless set of pickups designed as drop-in replacements for standard-sized Jazzmaster single-coils.
The new pickups use a three-coil design, flanking a main central coil with two smaller coils for hum-cancellation. The middle coil has, like regular Jazzmaster pickups, alnico pole-pieces – and so when installed, the Silencers have a totally traditional look. Can they breathe life back into my parts Jazzmaster build and put it back into live rotation?
Before installing the Seymour Duncan Hot Jazzmaster Silencers. Image: Cillian Breathnach
Install
The patient today is a parts Jazzmaster that I’ve Ship-Of-Theseus’d together over several years. The body is from a Squier Vintage Modified Jazzmaster, the hardware and the neck pickup are from a Classic Vibe Jazzmaster, and the bridge pickup is an aftermarket Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder. Its most drastic departure from a ‘traditional’ Jazzmaster is the neck, which is an aluminium Baguley baritone conversion. So, this guitar’s ‘original sound’ doesn’t really exist – it’s a blank canvas of Jazzmastery experimentation, perhaps perfect for a new pickup install.
Installing the Jazzmaster Silencers is basically as complex as installing any set of humbuckers, as their lead houses four conductors as well as a bare shield wire. In a normal humbucker, this wiring would allow you to split the coils – presumably here the four conductors could also be used to isolate the outer coils from the main coil, and perhaps undo the whole point of the pickup. I’ll leave that experiment for another day.
There’s an included wiring scheme printout to make things easier, presuming you want to opt for a standard Jazzmaster layout. If you want something non-traditional, this wiring scheme does also indicate which leads are which, so you can adapt it into another scheme.
Installing the Hot Jazzmaster Silencers. Image: Cillian Breathnach
As I install the pickups, I’m very grateful for how the wiring includes a strain relief bracket – the pickup’s main lead isn’t just soldered on, it’s also bolted to the case with a sturdy bit of metal. If you’ve ever installed new pickups in a Jazzmaster, you’ll know it can be a bit of a dexterity test keeping the guard and the pickups under control as you get things positioned, so the added reassurance that I wasn’t going to break any wires off was very much appreciated.
The Jazzmaster Silencers are true drop-in replacements – to the point where they fit some well-worn cream pickup covers I have. This pleasingly allows me to match the plastics across the guitar. I was worried that their triple-coil design would ask for a bespoke cover style, or that they might even be glued in to keep their hum-cancelling design magic a secret. Not so – they’re easily switched! If you are ordering your own set, Seymour Duncan gives you the option of cream, white, parchment or black covers.
How’s the hum?
With a gain pedal engaged, I plug in the newly-wired Jazzmaster – and am struck by the sound of almost silence. I say almost silence as a totally quiet system is just unfeasible. However, A/Bing between the Silencers and some humbuckers, the Silencers are just as quiet – if not more so. The only hum is what I’d expect from a loud amp being boosted with a dirt pedal – compared to that same setup with the single-coils, it’s a huge improvement. So a success on the ‘noiseless’ front!
Installing the Hot Jazzmaster Silencers. Image: Cillian Breathnach
How’s the sound?
I’m looking at the Hot variant of the Silencer Jazzmasters – there’s also a vintage-output set available for those who want to keep things more old-school but still hum-free. For my high-gain purposes the Hot pickups are ideal – I’ve set most of my rig up to deal with higher-output humbuckers anyway, and so the Hot set should require less knob-twiddling.
I give things a tentative go into the overdrive channel of an Orange Super Crush 100. First observation – these things bark. They absolutely retain the character of true single-coil Jazzmaster pickups – the neck is warm, round and full-bodied, while the bridge pickup cuts like a scimitar – overall they’ve got a great balance between a full low-end, a slightly scooped midrange and a very present high-end that you really don’t get from any other kind of pickup.
One thing that gives traditional Jazzmaster pickups their sound is the wide, flat coil – which more evenly senses a longer area of vibrating string. When I switch to a clean channel it’s also clear that those two flanking coils are filling out the sound in the same way, adding low-end thunk and high-end presence without ever focusing the response too hard in any one area. I have no idea what pickup-design magic Seymour Duncan is using to achieve this, but whatever it is, it’s clearly effective.
Those full-sized alnico pole-pieces are also definitely doing their job – the string separation is remarkable, and remains so as I switch to the rhythm circuit and engage a Big Muff-style fuzz. That’s an achievement, as for comparison the neck pickup that was in here before would immediately turn into a landslide’s worth of mud with any level of gain engaged.
The Hot Jazzmaster Silencer (bare). Image: Cillian Breathnach
Back to the bridge pickup on the lead circuit, and that level of punchy, high output is a great combination with the same Big Muff tone. It’s a sharp and aggressive sound, to the point where I’m legally obligated to turn on three delay pedals and refamiliarise myself with the Jazzmaster vibrato’s operational limits. Which is to say: it’s time for the Shoegaze Test.
The Silencers pass this test with flying colours – this is ultimately a baritone Jazzmaster running through a rig built for delay-soaked doom. With this many pedals on, the actual ‘voice’ of the pickups becomes somewhat academic. But there is a degree of clarity retained as things get heavy – the main problem the Silencers solve is that, rather than fading into a mix of feedback and over-amplified mains hum, the Silencers bloom into pure, loud, singing feedback when the limits of natural sustain are reached,.
As much as ‘chugging’ isn’t really the sort of metal that I personally need this guitar to do, it is also worth giving them a test with a more modern metal sound, and for that I break out the UAFX Anti set to a do-it-all gated chug. These pickups chug as much as any Jazzmaster-style single-coils can, noiseless or otherwise – the aggressive scoop of the bridge pickup means a much more biting sound than I would normally dial in, but it has its own gnarly appeal.
Should I buy a set of Jazzmaster Silencers?
So, up until now, everything has been pretty hunky dory for the Silencers. They sound great, their noise rejection is brilliant, they look the part and their construction is rock solid. However, all of that does not come cheap.
A set of Silencers will set you back $278 – a fair deal of dollarydoos for a set of pickups, even if they are pretty damn fantastic. Right now they’re also only sold as a set, so if you were hoping to save by only replacing one, then tough luck. It’s also worth noting that talking about the price of US-made music gear in June 2025 is akin to asking how much one of those lovely Titanic deck chairs will set you back just as the boat starts to tip. Depending on how some Supreme Court rulings shake out, the Silencers might well be a good deal pricier by the end of the year.
But the Silencers do ultimately deliver on the ultimate promise of noiseless single-coils: all of the tone, none of the buzz. For some, there’ll be no price too high for that.
Jazzmaster Silencer alternatives:
The Silencers are not the only noiseless Jazzmaster pickups out there – Fralin makes a well-regarded set with a stacked dual-coil design, and if you’re willing to go even more non-traditional, EMG’s active JMaster set is also an interesting option.
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