Seymour Duncan 2022 Holiday Gift Guide: Gifts for Guitar Players

Last Updated on January 26th, 2023

Find the perfect gift for the guitarist in your life.

 

Need tone for the holidays? You aren’t alone. Buying guitar pickups for a loved one (or even for yourself) can be a daunting task. However, that’s why we at Seymour Duncan have put together this Holiday Gift Guide for 2022. Using the information in this guide, we aim to help you dial in the perfect gifts for the guitar players in your life.

What are the best gifts for guitar players? The answer is usually more gear. But buying your brother-in-law a guitar can be expensive. This list of our best-selling pickup singles and sets is based on our best-selling pickups of 2022, so rest assured these are some of our customers’ favorites, and basically, you can’t go wrong with a single product on this list. We’ve even included a few bass pickup options as well. This guide has got you covered! So instead of giving yet another guitar strap (unless it’s a Seymour Duncan guitar strap) this holiday season, why not give the gift of great tone?

Did you know? Changing your guitar pickups is the easiest way to improve the tone of your instrument. Many import guitars are equipped out of the factory with lower quality pickups to save money, so buying a new set of pickups can completely redefine your sound!

Don’t have a guitar tech nearby? At the bottom of this article, we’ve shared a special free gift for you or for your loved one to be unlocked on December 26th (as to not spoil the surprise, of course) on how to install pickups yourself. Read on for more details.

 

Table of Contents

  1. How to Choose the Best Guitar Pickups
  2. Our Best-Selling Pickup Sets
  3. Our Best-Selling Individual Pickups
  4. BONUS: A Free Gift from Seymour Duncan

 

How to Choose the Best Guitar Pickups

 

There are two main factors to look out for when choosing guitar pickups for yourself or for someone else. These two factors can be separated into color and tone.

Color – for many guitar players, looks are important and that’s okay! That’s why you need to determine what color pickups you need first. Most common covered humbucking pickups come in nickel, chrome, gold and sometimes even aged. Single coils can range from white to cream to black and many other colors (it’s easy to swap the single coil covers out for other colors in case you need something more specific besides those options). Humbuckers can even come uncovered, in black, white, matte back, zebra, reverse zebra, etc. The first step here is to determine what color you want/need. If your friend has all gold hardware on their Gibson ES-335, they will likely want gold covered humbuckers.

 

 

Tone – sometimes, it can be hard to determine what kind of pickups you should get. That’s why it’s important to ask yourself “what kind of music do I want to be playing?” We make pickups for a wide variety of genres, with some options below spanning multiple genres and decades of music, from classic rock to jazz to death metal to pop and beyond. We’ve included a helpful description of each of the products listed below so you can make an informed decision based on style, genre and best use case. Each of the individual product pages we’ve linked to has sound samples, videos and more if you want to go down the rabbit role.

Sometimes the hardest step can be making the decision of which ones to get, but once again, remember: these are some of our best sellers so you really can’t go wrong with any of the products on this list!

 

 

Our Best-Selling Pickup Sets

jazz neck and jb bridge

1) Hot Rodded HB Set

Seymour created this classic humbucker combination while in England in 1974, and it remains his favorite set of pickups to this day – an SH-4 JB for the bridge and SH-2n Jazz Model for the neck. Together these pickups have become one of the most timeless and versatile humbucker sets ever built.

The JB Model humbucker adds juice and versatility to the bridge position of any humbucker equipped guitar. It’s the perfect bridge pickup for anything from blues & country to the meanest hard rock & metal. Originally designed as the matching neck pickup for the JB Model bridge pickup, the Jazz is an incredibly versatile humbucker that will work for almost any style of music.

 

2) Seth Lover Set

The Seth Lover vintage output humbucker pickups are the perfect choice for players wanting to transform a solid body or semi-hollow into a singing classic rock machine. The neck model gives you a smooth but articulate tone by striking the perfect balance of warm, full low-end and a nice, sweet treble. The alnico 2 bar magnet helps to smooth the high-end response, while the vintage output coils bring out this pickup’s rich harmonic content. The Seth Lover pickups are carefully hand built in Santa Barbara to Seth Lover’s original exacting specs.

 

3) Invader Set

No matter how dangerous your stock pickup claims to sound, the Invader will transform your guitar into the mean, heavy-sounding beast you always knew it could be. The Invader’s power comes from the combination of specially overwound coils, three large ceramic magnets, and its striking, oversized metal oxide pole pieces. Chords sound almost subsonic with lower tunings, but balance nicely with the crunchy treble, keeping everything well defined. While the Invader bridge looks mean and vicious, because it is mean and vicious, the Invader neck humbucker is surprisingly warm and smooth, despite its intimidating looks, and yields a thick crunch and rich sustain.

 

4) Slash Set

When Slash was given the honor of having a Gibson Les Paul Signature model built, we accepted the challenge to make him a new pickup that would make all of his new signature guitars sound just like the original “Appetite For Destruction” Les Paul. The result is the Slash Signature Model humbucker.

We used a different mag wire and winding spec that, when combined with the alnico 2 bar magnet, provided exactly what was needed to push a stock Les Paul toward that familiar sustain, crunch, and midrange that was so characteristic of the tone of Slash’s original Derrig Les Paul copy.

 

5) PJ Set Quarter Pound

Together these Quarter Pound bass pickups provide a sonically full voice with a “hold on to your hats” high-output punch. Each strike of the string provides a full low-end bite with plenty of sustain. They’ve provided their unique punch for bass players from Blink 182, Alien Ant Farm, Rise Against, Bad Religion and Smashing Pumpkins. Massive attitude from the Jazz bass pickup in the bridge together with fat full punchy P-bass tone.

 

Our Best-Selling Individual Pickups

 

1) The JB Model

JB Model Pickup

The JB Model humbucker is our most popular pickup of all time. Blues, country, fusion, punk, hard rock, grunge, thrash; the JB has always sounded just right, even as new genres emerged around it. The low end is full and powerful, the highs are crisp and detailed and there’s an upper-midrange bump that adds crunch and chunk to heavy chords but translates to a singing, vocal-like quality when you play single notes or solos. Meanwhile the hot output pushes your amp just that little bit harder for more sustain and harmonics.

 

2) Hum Cancelling Woody

The Woody SC is a passive, magnetic soundhole pickup that delivers a bright, clear acoustic tone that is great for both energetic strumming, and delicate fingerstyle playing. The fact that it is a single coil means that you get more chime, and top-end brilliance. All of our Woody pickups are available in our custom maple, walnut or black stained housing, and are double potted to keep them resistant to feedback. It mounts instantly into your guitars’ soundhole, with no modification of any kind needed to your instrument and can easily be removed at a moment’s notice.

 

3) Quarter Pound for P-Bass

There’s a reason this is our most popular bass pickup: massive tone. The QP has a fat, punchy tone that pushes P-bass pickups past previous models with design and frequency improvements. The quarter-inch diameter pole pieces expand the magnetic field and extend the frequency ranges for a fat, full, punchy sound with tremendous mid-range presence and maximum output. Though often used for heavy rock tones, this pickup gives amazing tonal versatility, making it a favorite across the board in live and studio settings.

 

4) Hot Rails for Strat

End your quest for fire with the Hot Rails for Strat single coil sized humbuckers. The Hot Rails model uses a strong ceramic magnet and overwound coils to deliver big sounding, well balanced humbucker tones for rock and metal. Clean tones are fat and warm, and solos will have that thick, fluid feel. The dual blade construction gives you the ultimate string coverage, especially for notes that are bent on the highest frets.

 

5) SSL-5 Custom Staggered for Strat

David Gilmour needed a pumped-up sound for his famous Black Strat, so Seymour wound what became the Custom Staggered medium-output Stratocaster pickup. The Custom Staggered is a special overwound single-coil that strikes a great balance between increased output and classic Stratocaster tonal character. It will deliver bigger, fatter chords, and will cut through the mix more clearly than a traditional Strat pickup, all the while maintaining the magic and mojo that make a Strat sound like a Strat. Single notes are bold and loud, and solos truly sing.

 

BONUS: A Free Gift from Seymour Duncan

 

So you’ve figured out your pickups and have them in the cart – yes! Before you go, we’d love to give you or your loved ones a special free gift so they can install guitar or bass pickups themselves. Great tone AND a new hobby to throw themselves into? Sign us up!

We have built a Free Pickup Installation course that we invite you to join. All you have to do is click the button below, sign up and get started.

 

FREE GIFT!

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