Category Archives: Reviews

Varying on an already proven theme (the venerable Seymour Duncan Custom), the Custom Custom features the familiar Duncan Custom coil-wind with an Alnico 2 magnet as opposed to the standard ceramic magnet for a sweeter, more subtle yet no-less deadly variant on the Custom tone.

I’m a hardcore Les Paul lover. For years I refused to play anything else but Les Pauls. I tried to get all the tones I wanted from them, but three years ago that started to change. I got myself a hollowbody Les Paul and saw myself using that guitar for ‘hollowbody tones.’ With that guitar as a stepping stone, a small urge developed inside me to get a Strat and a Tele.

Let me first say this:
The Seymour Duncan Custom Shop RTM bridge humbucker is one of the coolest pickups you’ve probably never thought about trying.
When the good people at Seymour Duncan told me I could choose any Custom Shop model to review for this blog, I had no idea which one to pick. Generally, all of my guitars sound pretty good. There were no glaring weaknesses or trouble spots that really needed addressing, but I had my pick of some of the best custom-wound pickups in the business and I was absolutely not going to waste that opportunity.

Before there were amplifiers with master volumes, dedicated gain selectors and almost complete armies of overdrive pedals and stomp boxes, guitar players relied on pickups with higher output to drive their amps into higher gain territory than previously possible. Many players would swap out a pickup for a hotter specimen. The Seymour Duncan SH-4 JB…

For those that read my last review of the 59/Custom Hybrid and the STK-S7 used as an S/H combo (or as a primer for anyone that didn’t), l love Strats with Floyds and S/H pickup combos. That’s probably my No.1 favorite pickup combo, followed by a S/S/S combo with a vintage Strat bridge, and then any LP-style two humbucker setup (Floyd optional!).

The P in P-rails stands for Phunk! When the guitar player from the Parliament Funkadelic called and said she wasn’t happy with the tone from her stock pickups, Seymour Duncan didn’t hesitate. A tech from the Duncan factory met Shaunna Hall at the Gibson Amphitheater a few hours before the show to bring her guitar…