Category Archives: News

Monte Pittman is one of those guitarists that you can rely on to cover any musical situation you throw at them. Just look at his resume: from Prong to Madonna and Adam Lambert, Pittman has the chops, tone and professionalism to slip into a song with the right balance of musical authenticity and individual personality. In November 2012 he released M.P.3: The Power Of Three, Part 1.

Anthrax have been going from strength to strength for the past few years. With the return of Joey Belladonna, the Big Four shows, and the 2011 release of Worship Music, Anthrax have been tearing it up all over the world.
Since Anthrax are returning to Australian shores as part of the Soundwave Festival I thought it would be good to ask Seymour Duncan artist, Anthrax guitarist and founding member Scott Ian a few questions.

The ’59 Model humbucker is a very versatile humbucker. By using the same materials and methods as the original PAF pickup, a vintage-correct sound is achieved. It has vintage-level output, which means plenty of sparkle, while still having the throatiness that humbuckers are known for.If, however, your guitar doesn’t have a space where you can…

We all know Gary Hoey can do pretty much anything on guitar. His cover of prototypical prog classic ‘Hocus Pocus’ was a Top 5 Billboard Mainstream Rock hit in 1993. In 1994 his soundtrack to Endless Summer II single-handedly made surf music cool again in the eyes of players raised on shred. His Ho Ho…

Les Pauls are famous for the tone the neck pickup produces. I feel that a Strat and Tele (in my opinion the two other ‘big ones’) also have an amazing neck pickup tone, but the Les Paul really shines and sings when you add some gain to it.

A pickup is nothing more but a large strand of copper wire, wrapped thousands of times around a holder (called the bobbin) forming a coil, and somewhere stuck to the coil you have a magnet. In some very simple designs the magnet itself can be the bobbin! The wires of a pickups are extremely thin – something like the thickness of hairs, maybe even thinner. But there is no such thing as a ‘one size fits all,’ standard wire.

I remember the day I got my first electric guitar – a cheap Status brand Stratocaster copy. It wasn’t exactly the greatest axe in the world, but I loved that damn thing. Put thousands of hours of fingergrease into it. And it only took a few weeks of being an electric guitarist to realise – the middle pickup was where a lot of my favourite sounds were.

Each year the world’s makers of musical instruments and accessories gather in Anaheim, California for the NAMM Show. This year at the Seymour Duncan booth we will be having live demos from some incredible artists. If you plan on attending, we are located in Hall B at booth 5561. To see what it’s like to…

Fresh off a recent tour with Jeff Loomis and currently in the studio working on a new release for his band Shaded Enmity, Joe Nurre joins us to write about picking out the right string gauge for metal. When I first started using a 7 string and guitars in alternate tunings, I found myself constantly…

One thing I’ve been really wanting for a while now is a Strat. I’ve been playing Ibanez guitars equipped with Floyd Rose type bridges pretty much exclusively since I was 16. Now the thing is, I wanted a Strat, but not many actual Fenders or Squiers (or other guitar companies building Strat-style guitars) offered what I was after at a good (read: cheap) price. Most of the Fenders and Squiers I looked at have 9.5″ radius fretboards, which would bug me after a while. I wanted black hardware too, and Fender doesn’t seem to have many models like that anyway.