Category Archives: News

Some guitarists like their chorus to be subtle and traditional. Others prefer bold and unique. The Catalina Dynamic Chorus is designed to do it all: classic chorus and vibrato, deep 80’s goth, simulated double-tracking, watery grunge cleans and rotating speaker simulations.

Seymour Duncan Releases The Catalina Dynamic Chorus Effects Pedal SANTA BARBARA, January 17, 2016 – Seymour Duncan, a leading manufacturer of pickups and pedals, announces the release of the Catalina™ Dynamic Chorus pedal. The Catalina effects pedal includes a uniquely innovative Dynamic Expression™ mode that allows you to control the depth of the effect through…

You’ve heard that sound before: that watery, bubbly, thick guitar sound slathered over almost every clean guitar part from the late 1970’s throughout the 1980’s. That is the sound of a chorus effect, and when I was young, it was everywhere. It was the second pedal I ever bought (right behind the Next Distortion X),…

Even some of the nicest guitars are not above the fray of guitar upgrades. In most cases a guitar, right out of the box, isn’t going to be perfectly suited to your own preferences and playing style. Like an archer tweaks and adjusts his bow, so a guitarist will customize and upgrade their instrument until…

One of the earliest and most popular effects for cleaner styles is reverb. When Fender started making amps with a reverb unit built inside the amp case, we had the birth of surf music, and instrumental rock. This was a huge influence on guitars sounds for decades. and fueled the British Invasion bands that swept over…

I read online forums a lot and I always have to laugh to myself when I read that someone wants a chime-filled single coil sound from their hot humbucker, or when someone wonders why their Les Paul sounds nothing like their Strat. True, I didn’t know these answers when I first started, and there were no…

Few pickups are so amazingly well designed that they take on almost any magnet you throw at it as the SH-5 Custom. There are three totally unique pickups available in the Custom family, all of which share the same basic ‘DNA’ – the coils and baseplate – but differ in its type of magnet.

KISS’s Tommy Thayer has one of the coolest jobs in the world: he gets to hop up on stage every night and occupy the persona of the Spaceman, one of KISS’s four classic characters. Although the role was originally inhabited by Ace Frehley, and Thayer is mindful of paying tribute to the classic guitar parts…

It’s fairy common to read about sustain in guitar reviews. Some guitars have lots of it, some have less. We sometimes perceive that a guitar is better if it has lots of sustain compared to if it doesn’t. Let’s pull on a thread to unravel the tapestry of what ‘sustain’ means in a technical and musical sense.

Seymour Duncan and Queensryche have had a long and fruitful partnership over the years: our pickups have been a part of the Queensrÿche sound for decades, and the band met vocalist Todd La Torre at our NAMM party a few years back.