Bring up the topic of guitar tone and one name quickly rises to the top of any discussion — Seymour W. Duncan. A living legend in the world of electric guitar, Duncan not only pioneered the customization of the electromagnetic guitar pickup, he broke open the gates of guitar repair and alteration — all in the pursuit of dialing in a particular player’s individual tone¹. Duncan’s work was foundational in creating the field of aftermarket guitar modification and his pickups and designs have been used by millions of players throughout the world for over 50 years².

The pickup is the heart of an electric guitar. Embedded in the guitar’s body beneath the strings, a pickup senses the vibrations of the strings and converts these vibrations into electrical signals, which are then fed to an amplifier³. And depending on a myriad of pickup variations, assemblies, and designs, a player’s unique and individual sound — or tone — is born. Duncan revolutionized the customization of the guitar pickup — experimenting with metals, magnets, bobbins, wires, and assembly strategies to see how each small change affected the overall sound. This constant re-engineering and reinvention eventually became the precise science behind the distinctive tones of the world’s greatest guitarists — Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Slash, and Eddie Van Halen to name just a few^{4 5}.

Early Life

Young Seymour W Duncan

Seymour Duncan was born on February 11, 1950 in Camden, New Jersey. An only child, he showed a distinct curiosity early on for discovering how electronics operated — taking apart and fixing his own radios and record players. Duncan’s father worked for DuPont, and the family lived in several southern New Jersey towns as he grew up and developed a deep appreciation of music.

He was introduced to guitar at age 12 by his uncle. Even though he didn’t know how to play, Duncan felt an immediate attraction to the instrument and began lobbying his family to get him his first electric guitar (unfortunately, that Christmas he received an accordion instead)⁶. His family did however, take him on a trip that would forever change his life and love of pickups — to see Les Paul and Mary Ford play at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. “After the show, my uncle took me backstage and introduced me to Les,” Duncan recalls. “That was the thrill of a lifetime … it was the first professional I had ever seen in person.”⁷ Paul, a renowned guitar pioneer and innovator, was impressed by the young enthusiast and he allowed him to hang around backstage at gigs, even as Duncan peppered him with questions⁸. As Duncan remembers, “I would say to Mr. Paul, ‘What is that thing under your strings?’ Les replied that it was a pickup. I asked him how it worked and he said it has a coil of insulated magnet wire wrapped many times around a magnet. He said the different gauges of wire and number of turns makes the pickup have a certain impedance.” Duncan began experimenting at home with anything he could find to make an electric guitar. Taking apart a shortwave radio provided him his first magnet and wire, while input jacks and cartridges were pilfered from old record players⁹.

Seymour W Duncan with Les Paul

The following Christmas brought him his first electric setup — a Les Paul shaped Silvertone 1423L guitar and a Sears Silvertone 1472 amp with tremolo. “I played for hours and didn’t even open my other presents,” he recalls. “I was hooked … and that was the beginning of my life’s profession. I practiced when I got up in the morning, at lunch during school hours, after school and in the evenings.” Unschooled in music, Duncan saw the classic Mel Bay guitar course on the shelves of a music store in Woodberry, NJ, but didn’t have the money to purchase it. Instead, he wrote a letter to the author telling him he was a beginning guitarist and wanted to learn all the chords he could. Two weeks later, he received a package from Mr. Bay himself containing his Guitar Chord Encyclopedia book and a handwritten note wishing him good luck. (Decades later, Duncan met Bay at a trade show event and thanked him personally for starting him on the journey. Bay replied that he was glad Duncan continued in the music business)¹⁰.

Duncan’s love of the instrument paid dividends — as did his innate perfect pitch — as he quickly learned to play by ear the music of his favorite artists — particularly The Ventures, Chet Atkins, Lonnie Mack, and Duane Eddy¹¹. Another Christmas brought him his first tape recorder, which he used to tape any TV show featuring music (particularly guitar solos) and later entire albums. He would then slow the tape down to half-speed to learn the guitar parts, and soon was able to chart the chords for any song on the radio. As Duncan became a sought after guitarist in various bands and sessions himself, he never strayed far from his love of tinkering and modification. In high school he’d sell chord charts to local bands for 25¢ a song, which he used to purchase more records as well as more reel-to-reel tape¹².

Inspiration — Roy Buchanan

He was most inspired, however, seeing Roy Buchanan play at the local club Dick Lee’s. Duncan was only 13 and too young to enter the club. But a cousin knew the owner and persuaded Mr. Lee to let him sit at the side of the stage to watch Buchanan’s magic. “When Buchanan was in the house,” Duncan recalls, “guitarists from a wide area would flock in to watch him and steal his licks.” Duncan was particularly impressed with Buchanan’s pinch harmonics, during which Buchanan would turn side-stage when performing to hide his technique from onlookers. Sitting side-stage himself, Duncan fascinatingly took it all in, and credits Buchanan with giving him his first “real lesson in tone.”¹³

Pickup Problems

Seymour with the Tele-Gib

Duncan’s playing kept improving, and by his mid-teens he was playing in a variety of bands. It was during his time as lead guitarist for his band The Sparkles that Duncan first discovered the need for pickup repair. During a gig, the bridge pickup on his Fender Telecaster stopped working¹⁴. As Duncan puts it, “It was my bread and butter. I needed to keep my guitar in working order … and I just couldn’t keep using the rhythm pickup of my Telecaster for lead work.” Duncan disassembled the pickup, and with the help of his father, set upon repairing it. Without any guide or teacher, he utilized any avenue afforded him — a microscope from biology classroom, a local motor winding shop, and engineering contacts via his uncle at Texaco. Eventually Duncan rewound the pickup by hand using a three-speed record turntable¹⁵. “I mounted a block of wood to the center guide, then placed some mounting pins to hold it while hand-winding … It taught me several lessons about winding speed, precision — and especially patience.”

Through trial and error, constant experimentation, and his innate innovation, Duncan gradually honed his skills at rewinding pickups, and realized an enormous vacuum existed for his services. “In the mid ‘60s, I started finding all kinds of broken guitars in music shops around South Jersey that had great action and playability, but the electronics didn’t work. Folks were just throwing the guitars away … I started doing all kinds of guitar work for local music stores.” And as Duncan advanced from rewinding broken pickups to fabricating his own parts and creating his own designs, he became more and more obsessed with the vast tonal possibilities he was discovering. Always seeking to learn more, Duncan wrote to the Fender Musical Instruments in California for advice and continued his communication with Les Paul. He also befriended Seth Lover at Gibson (the inventor of the humbucking pickup)¹⁶. Word quickly spread that if you wanted a particular sound, Seymour Duncan was the man to talk to.

A photo of Jimi Hendrix backstage, taken by Seymour W Duncan.

Jimi Hendrix

By 1968, Duncan’s reputation as a pickup guru was confirmed when he received a message from Jimi Hendrix’s manager that the legendary guitarist wanted to meet him. On March 28th of that year, Duncan found himself backstage at Xavier University in Cincinnati before a show by The Experience. Hendrix’s guitar tech, Roger Mayer, had communicated with Duncan about some problem they were having with Jimi’s pickups. So Duncan arrived with two sets of custom pickups he had hand wound and dipped in candle wax, which Mayer immediately installed in Hendrix’s white Fender Stratocaster¹⁷. Hendrix then asked Duncan to carry the guitar up on stage that night, an event that would set in motion Duncan’s future and legacy. Recalls Duncan, “(Hendrix) was such a hero to so many of us … he really loved guitar and he loved working on guitars and messing with them. I believe Jimi gave me inspiration to make guitar tone and to help players as he had done with me.”

Fender Sound House — London

At the suggestion of Les Paul, Duncan traveled to London In 1973. There he met up with Roy Buchanan and his manager, Jaye Reich, who were recording at Polydor Records. While recording, Duncan saw an ad that Fender Soundhouse was opening on Tottenham Court Road and needed a repairman. “My manager, Norman Vandenberg, wrote Fender Soundhouse a letter and told them about me. He told them that I was an American guy over there recording for Polydor. He told them I was an excellent guitar repairman who knew Fender better than anyone he’d ever seen. So I went over and met with Ron Roka, who was the manager of the service repair area. I went in one day and repaired 13 guitars, just like that.” Duncan’s work at the Fender Soundhouse eventually led to him doing session work on a variety of recordings as well as working with a who’s who list of major musicians including Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Gary Glitter, George Harrison, Gary Moore, Jimmy Page, Robert Palmer, Graham Parker, Suzi Quatro, Cat Stevens, Pete Townshend, Robin Trower, and Joe Walsh, as well as bands such as Bad Company, Golden Earring, Mott the Hoople, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Slade, Supertramp, Thin Lizzy, T. Rex, and Yes¹⁸.

Seymour W Duncan and Jeff Beck

Jeff Beck & the Tele-Gib

It was also at the Fender Soundhouse that Duncan was introduced to Jeff Beck, who he had always been a fan of since hearing Beck’s tone on The Yardbirds’s “Heart Full of Soul.” Beck happened to be recording down the street at the CBS studio when Duncan created the now legendary “Tele-Gib” guitar — the first Fender Telecaster to feature humbucking pickups (which required extensive experimentation, retrofitting and re-routing by Duncan). “I had some old Humbucking pickups I brought with me from Cincinnati that were from a broken Flying V that belonged to Lonnie Mack. I decided to make the Telecaster into a two humbucking Tele … Over the course of the next several days I worked on each detail of the guitar, so that it would be something unique and worthy of Jeff’s talent. Once it was finally ready, I brought Jeff the completed guitar and he seemed impressed by it.”¹⁹ Beck was indeed taken by the Tele-Gib, calling it “a great guitar that is really the best of both worlds,” and using it on his seminal George Martin-produced album Blow by Blow — widely considered one of the greatest guitar instrumental records of all time²⁰. The guitar featured a prototype of what would eventually become Duncan’s most famous pickup design, the “JB” —  later put into production and becoming the world’s most popular guitar pickup²¹. Notable users of the JB include Billie Joe Armstrong, Jerry Cantrell, Kurt Cobain, Dave Mustaine, Brad Paisley, Joe Perry, Joe Satriani, and Paul Stanley.^{22 23 24}

Return to the States

An old photo of the first Seymour Duncan building

Returning to the states in the early ‘70s, Duncan brought with him his reputation as a hotshot pickup rewinder and guitar tech. But he wanted to make his own pickups rather than simply rewinding others’. In 1974, he sold a guitar for $800, using the funds to purchase his first coil machine, and began making his own unique pickups from the ground up. Always seeking to further hone his craft, Duncan reached out to Fender Musical Instruments (whose phone number he “borrowed” from a secretary’s Rolodex during his Polydor days) and was eventually able to reach Leo Fender himself, who like Les Paul took a liking to the young enthusiast. “I talked to him about why he did this, why he did that … he was very cool about it,” Duncan recalls.

Duncan moved to Santa Barbara in 1975 and began working in the back of the historical Jensen Music, making pickups and doing repair work²⁵. Together with his wife at the time, Cathy Carter Duncan, they formed the Seymour Duncan company in 1976, specializing in handcrafted pickups. Constantly fixing, building, and improving pickups, demand continued to increase for his work, and the company eventually grew to become the world’s leading supplier of high-end, USA-made pickups, forging relationships with the top guitar companies in the world.^{26 27 28}

A Leesona pickup winding machine that now lives at Seymour Duncan

Antiquities

In the ‘90s, Duncan began to “relic” or pre-age a special line of pickups just as two things were happening: the vintage guitar market was booming, and guitarists were beginning to relic their own instruments²⁹. As guitars are one of the few items that get better (and thus more valuable) with age and use³⁰, specimens from the golden age of ‘50s-’60s rock and roll became increasingly hard to acquire and began fetching astronomical prices. Players seeking the specific identifiable tones of their guitar heroes were left wanting. So Duncan sought out a way to re-create these vintage pickups — using the same factory that built the original molds for parts, working directly with Seth Lover, even procuring some of the original winding machines from the early Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan — developing a unique process that simulated both the tone and look of a broken-in pickup³¹. This line of pickups, dubbed “Antiquities,” were the world’s first cosmetically and sonically aged guitar pickups and helped fuel the entire relic craze.³²

Custom Shop

Seymour W Duncan in the Custom Shop

Since establishing the company, Duncan has continued to design pickups for some of the world’s foremost guitarists, who travel to Santa Barbara to consult with him. Often called the “guitar pickup king,” to guitarists around the world Duncan remains something of a legend and tone guru. Duncan prefers working individually with players to understand what tone they are seeking and translating that information into his custom manufacturing. “I don’t really deal with the business side that much,” Duncan admits. “Myself, I like making pickups. My name’s on the door, but I’m still in the shop every day, working. That’s what I like doing. I enjoy being hands-on and then playing once in a while, here and there.”³³

Brad Paisley, MJ and Seymour W Duncan

During his time at the custom shop, Duncan has worked with Lari Basilio, Jennifer Batten, George Benson, Dickey Betts, Joe Bonamassa, John Fogerty, Billy Gibbons, Neil Giraldo, Dave Grohl, Ben Harper, Scott Ian, Tony Iommi, Carol Kaye, Lemmy Kilmister, Mark Knopfler, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Yngwie Malmsteem, Steve Miller, Prince, Randy Rhoads, Keith Richards, James Taylor, Randy Travis, Joe Walsh, Nancy Wilson, and Dweezil Zappa, as well as the bands Bad Religion, Blink 182, Blondie, Bon Jovi, The Cars, EWF (Earth, Wind, & Fire), El Tri, Green Day, Grupo Firme, Hall & Oates, Heart, Incubus, Iron Maiden, Jaguares, Journey, KISS, Limp Bizkit, Los Lobos, Lonestar, Mana, Nirvana, Poison, Queens of the Stone Age, Quiet Riot, Social Distortion, Sonic Youth, Thievery Corporation, Thin Lizzy, Tool, and Wilco³⁴.

Notable recordings featuring his pickups include “All The Small Things” (Blink 182), “Have a Cigar” (Pink Floyd), “Man in the Box” (Alice in Chains), “Maniac” (Michael Sembello), “Rebel Yell” (Billy Idol), “Sweet Child O’ Mine” (Guns N’ Roses), “Whole Lotta Love” (Led Zeppelin), “Whiskey Lullaby” (Brad Paisley), and “With or Without You” (U2).

Seymour W Duncan and Cathy Carter Duncan at the Vintage Guitar Awards

Awards and Honors

Duncan was inducted into the Vintage Guitar Hall of Fame in 2011³⁵. In 2012, he was inducted into Guitar Player Magazine’s Hall of Fame and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Music & Sound Retailer Magazine³⁶. He has held two Guinness Book of World records (world’s largest guitar and world’s largest pickup),^{37 38} served as the lead guitar tech at Live Aid, and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Duquesne University. He currently sits on the board of the Stone Age Institute³⁹. A signature model Seymour Duncan Esquire guitar was created by Fender Musical Instruments⁴⁰.

Personal Life

Duncan enjoys flintknapping, engraving, photography, and Ham radio. He collects military patches and baseball gloves and is also a master locksmith.