Category Archives: News

The tone of a Mini-Humbucker has been described as somewhere between a full sized humbucker and a single coil. Originally developed by the Epiphone company in the ’50s, they were brought over into Gibson models with the purchase of Epiphone in 1957. They are lower output but tend to be brighter, with more chime and…

Magnetic guitar pickups and microphones seem to do the same job: they turn the sounds we’re making into electrical signals, which we then either record, or amplify and use to drive speakers (or both). They’re the first thing in a chain that takes a quiet sound and makes it louder. But can we say  that…

The world of guitar is, like most things in life, full of strange buzzwords and mis-information. In this article we’ll focus on one of the most controversial of these terms: true bypass. By the end, you should understand exactly what it is, what it does, and why you do (or do not) want it in your pedals.

There’s a lot of ways from which you may know of the name Bill Mumy. Perhaps from Babylon 5 if you’re a child of the 90s, or more likely from his iconic role as Will Robinson on Lost In Space if you’re older, or a fan of vintage sci-fi TV dramas. Or maybe from his…

Perri Ink. – the company founded by guitarist Nick Perri of Silvertide – has introduced two new custom guitars, the South St and the Melrose. These instruments feature boldly different body styles to each other but they share a lot in common too: both feature quarter-sawn maple necks with reverse headstocks and rosewood fingerboards, solid alder bodies, vintage 6-hole tremolos, and a trio of Perri Ink. Label Seymour Duncan mini-humbucker pickups.

If you were to take a close look at the lineup of pickups from Seymour Duncan, you might notice a numbering system for the humbuckers: SH-1 (’59), SH-2 (Jazz), SH-3 (Stag Mag), all the way up to SH-18. This nice line of sequential pickups gives you an indication how old a specific design is. For example, it’s pretty commonly known that the SH-2 Jazz and SH-4 JB were developed simultaneously. It doesn’t take much imagination to think that those first few pickups were designed and released in the same era, the late 1970s. But look again and you might notice two gaping holes in the lineup. The SH-7 and SH-9 are missing!

When noiseless single-coil pickups are discussed, it won’t be long before someone says that they can never sound exactly like a real single coil. The fact that they’re humbuckers at the core means that some of that high-end sparkle disappears. There are some things to remember at this point.

It’s not just a pickup, it’s a weapon of  tonal Armageddon. The Nazgûl was designed with a single purpose; for intense high-output-chug heavy punch-you-in-the-chest ruthless distortion. The tone is heavy and aggressive but it also retains articulation and provides the precise pick attack that is necessary for high-output metal. The Nazgûl gives chords heavy saturation…

A couple of years ago I was looking for a replacement tremolo system to fit a Floyd Rose route. I stumbled on the tremolo system designed and build by Ola Strandberg. Even though my guitar and the tremolo system weren’t compatible after all (at least, I wasn’t willing to do the necessary, though minor, modifications),…

Ever since active pickups came out and many guitar manufacturers starting building with them in mind, there’s been one problem – the standard size of active pickups (Phase II) is different than the size of regular passive humbuckers. Changing out your active pickups for regular passive pickups just isn’t possible if your guitar was designed…