When people hear about Monte Pittman the first thing they usually think is Madonna AND Prong? Monte has established himself as an incredibly versatile artist and his primary secret weapon is the guitar he designed with Jarrel Guitars called the MPS. This guitar gives a ton of tonal combinations with our P-Rails, Vintage Hot Stack Plus & Custom Shop Dimebucker. From Tel Aviv to Istanbul, Monte has been travelling with Madonna to provide powerful guitar lines to her hit songs. Not only was Monte using a guitar loaded with our pickups but Madonna was also using a guitar loaded with special Custom Shop pickups as can be seen in this video.

After the show, we asked Monte how the pickups have affected his tone during the tour.

“The ’78 and the Greenie have been an important tool in both mine and Madonna’s guitar tone on the MDNA tour. If they work for who they were made for, then they work for us. Having my Jarrell MPS guitars fully loaded with Seymour Duncan pickups has pushed beyond the sky being the limit for all of the sounds I can achieve.”

Seymour Duncan’s Evan Skopp just recently returned from seeing Monte Pittman play with Madonna in Israel and had this to say:

“Watching a show like this was really amazing, even for someone who spends a lot of time attending shows. Everything, from the dancing and choreography to the lights, the video, the multi-media, the staging, and, of course, the instrumentation and guitar tones, were extraordinary. These were the highest production values I’ve ever witnessed and this was the first night of the tour. Oh yeah, and Madonna was amazing in her own right. I was really proud to see her playing a guitar with our Custom Shop pickups. And then there was Monte. He played his Jarrell MPS throughout the show, except for a couple of numbers which he played an acoustic or a Jerry Jones sitar. His guitar was clear and present, right up front in the mix, and he had an incredible variety of tones, from classic rock to sludgy metal to synth pop sounds. It was amazing that one guitar could have so many voices.”

Evan Skopp & Monte Pittman

“But the best highlight was after the show when my wife and I met Monte at his hotel and we walked down to a cafe on the beach. We sat in the sand drinking beers and watching the near-full moon setting over the Mediterranean. Eventually Brian Frasier-Moore, the drummer, stopped by and joined us. Then came the dancers and the video crew and the sound guys. And we sat there, all of us, chatting in the warm sand in the moonlight until 4:00AM going over the highlights of this amazing spectacle. For the band and crew it was the beginning of a long journey together and some were just getting to know each other for the first time. Then Monte left, and my wife and I walked back to our hotel. And the next day the band and crew took off for Abu Dhabi where they got to do it all again.”

For more on Monte & the MPS, check out the links below:
http://montepittman.com/

http://www.jarrellguitars.com/Jarrell-MPS/