Want to be in our next ad in Guitar World magazine and win yourself a pedal or seven?

Take a photo of you or your band using one of the current line of Seymour Duncan pedals (see them here) and enter it here for a chance to win the grand prize of having it featured in Guitar World, as well as one of every pedal we currently make!

Five other entries will be selected too, and each will receive their choice of any Seymour Duncan pedal from the current line-up. Be as creative as you’d like: serious, funny, stage shots, rehearsal pics, whatever you like. You can add your band’s name and any text or we can add this later if you win.

There’s a limit of two entries per person/band. Entries close August 31st. Oh and make sure you have consent for all people appearing in the photo.

There are a lot of options in the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop for us bass players. Whether you want something that’s fairly simple (like SPB-3 pole pieces with the SPB-1 wind) or something crazier, the folks at the Custom Shop can make it. With that in mind, when I was spec’ing out the parts for my new bass build, I knew we had to have some very special pickups in it. And it hit me:
Why not a Silver Zephyr Bass pickup? Continue reading “Silver Zephyr SPB-1 or Zephyr Voltron”

Guitarists today age are lucky. We have the world in our back pocket. We get to talk to people all over the world about our gear obsessions, and get to learn from those players who have more experience. We can live in remote areas of the world, where we don’t have access to great players and gear, and we can get that knowledge and our musical toys shipped right to our door. Learning to play guitar online is probably the number one way guitarists and bassists are learning these days. Whether it is looking up a tab to a song you always wanted to know, or Skype lessons with one of your favorite players, location isn’t the barrier to knowledge it once was. This article will introduce you to some well-known online lesson resources, as well as some not-so-well-known. You can learn those scales and chords sitting on your bed in your PJ’s and no one will judge you. Continue reading “Guide to Online Guitar Lessons”

Iron Maiden’s Dave Murray has been using the Hot Rails and JB Jr. single coil-sized humbucking pickups for years because of their power and versatility. As Dave puts it, “My Seymour Duncan pickups give me everything I need to get the maximum gain and versatility out of my guitar, but still with that classic Strat look.”

Now anybody can easily customize their Strat with Dave Murray’s preferred pickup set with the Seymour Duncan Dave Murray Loaded Pickguard For Stratocaster.

It comes pre-loaded with the neck and bridge versions of the Hot Rails with a JB Jr. in the middle position, as well as high-quality Bourns volume and tone pots and a 5-way pickup selector switch. You can get it in Pearloid, Black and White versions, each with the 11-hole mounting style which fits most post-1964 Strats. Each set comes with personalized with special stickers as well as pickguard installation instructions.

“The SD Hot Rails give a huge output on the neck and bridge, but without losing the clarity, and having the option of the lower output JB Jr. in the center gives a perfect option for clean tones,” Murray says. “Drop this into your Strat and ENJOY!”

These are the same pickups you’ll find in the new Fender Dave Murray California Series Stratocaster and they’ll cover a huge range of tones. The Hot Rails is ceramic humbucker which is very high in output but with plenty of detail to capture your pick attack and fretting-hand phrasing. The neck and bridge models have different outputs and complementary voicings: the bridge model’s DC Resistance is 16.9 k, and the neck is 10.8 k with a higher resonant peak to maintain clarity in a traditionally darker-sounding pickup location. And the JB Jr. is available in separate bridge and neck/middle models too. The Dave Murray Loaded Pickguard For Stratocaster has the middle version, with a DC Resistance of 9.6 k and a resonant peak a hair higher than the Hot Rails, ideal for clean sections which require detail and ‘zing’ in contrast to the Hot Rails’ roar.

Iron Maiden is about to release their new double album, The Book Of Souls. It’s their 16th studio album, and it was made with a new approach compared to the band’s previous records. As bass player (and fellow Seymour Duncan signature artist) Steve Harris explains, “We approached this album in a different way to how we’ve recorded previously.  A lot of the songs were actually written while we were there in the studio and we rehearsed and recorded them straight away while they were still fresh, and I think that immediacy really shows in the songs, they have almost a live feel to them, I think. I’m very proud of The Book Of Souls, we all are, and we can’t wait for our fans to hear it, and especially to take it out on the road next year!” Many of the album’s tracks break the 7-minute barrier, and the album will be available in 2CD deluxe hardbound book limited edition as well as 2CD standard edition, triple heavyweight black vinyl, high-res Audio in Mastered for iTunes and non-Mastered for iTunes versions, and standard res audio.

“Paradise City.” “Sweet Child O’Mine.” “Welcome To The Jungle.” “November Rain.” The list reads like the soundtrack of my early adolescence, like it does for so many. And for just as many, it’s also the list that inspired them to pick up a bass or guitar and play along with their heroes in Guns N’ Roses. Once we learned the songs, we lusted after the iconic tone that made up some of the most important albums of the post-“classic rock” era. How does Slash get that sweet warm sound? How does Duff McKagan get that booming clarity? Gilby Clarke’s tone? And for newer fans, how does DJ Ashba get his Les Paul to sound like that? Continue reading “Appetite For Destruction: Seymour Duncan Pickups & Guns N’ Roses”

A lot of players really love the Ibanez Talman line of electric guitars. (I should know – I’m one of ’em and I love my sparkly TC825 with Bigsby). It’s been years since the model was discontinued, and in that time they’ve become highly prized by a loyal group of fanatics. These guitars were made at a time when alternative and grunge reigned supreme, and they blended Ibanez playability with vintage-inspired features and a vaguely Jazzmaster-esque outline. They’re great for alternative, blues, country, indie, classic rock… basically really solid workhorse guitars for anything that requires detail and character. It’s also one of those body shapes that lends itself well to different pickup configurations, which Ibanez experimented with back in the day. We’ve noticed quite a few Talman fans on social media, many of whom have modded their guitars with Seymour Duncan pickups in interesting ways, from P-90s all the way up to active Blackouts. And now the Talman is back with five new Prestige models (and more on the way) unveiled at Summer NAMM last week, all of which feature Seymour Duncan pickups. Let’s check them out!

Continue reading “The Return Of The Ibanez Talman”

We asked “Bendmaster of the Telecaster” Jerry Donahue to share some of his secrets for setting up a Telecaster-style bridge and keeping it properly intonated. Jerry demonstrates this technique in his clinics, and it certainly applies to his Fret-King Black Label ‘JD’ Jerry Donahue signature guitar with his signature APTL-3DJ pickup. Take it away, Jerry!

Continue reading “Jerry Donahue On Telecaster-Style Bridge Intonation”

Active Pickup – A pickup using an electronic preamp to achieve gain enhancement, tonal shaping and/or output impedance reduction. Some advantages include less susceptibility to noise, greater flexibility in creating new tones and the elimination of high frequency losses caused by driving long cables. Active pickups can be particularly useful for producing the strong noise free signal needed to drive multi-effects racks. (For comparison, see “Passive Pickup”).

Continue reading “Glossary of Tone Terms”

Whammy bars, or more properly called vibrato systems, are one of the oldest methods of manipulating the sound from the electric guitar itself. Through the years, many have come and gone, and a handful of designs have endured. Perhaps the ones that fell by the wayside were too bulky, or they couldn’t get the right rock stars to sing their praises. In some cases, they solved some problems while introducing a few more. This article is about some that we have either forgot about, or need to know more about. You will find no original Floyd Roses, Kahlers, or Bigsbys in this group. Those designs have lasted for years, and most guitarists are familiar with those. Here, you get the weird, the wacky, and the forgotten mechanical methods to change the pitch of all of the strings at once. Continue reading “The Most Interesting Whammy Bars In the World”

Just like guitars, effects come in all shapes and sizes. For guitarists, the first effects were built right into amplifiers. Reverb and tremolo were about all you could hope for, and about a decade or so after that, the fuzz box made an appearance. While these effects seem downright quaint by today’s standards, they are still used on hundreds of recordings and thousands of gigs each year. There was a time in the not-so-distant past where guitarists were faced with decisions about how they should add effects to their rigs. True, there were a few amps and even guitars with built-in effects, guitarists settled mostly on the pedal approach. It is easy to see why: pedals were pretty inexpensive, sounded pretty cool, and most music required just a handful of different sounds.

Exit the Pedals, Enter the Rack

As recorded music got more complex (probably after Pet Sounds & Sgt. Pepper’s), guitarists became enamored with the effects that were available inside a recording studio. Recording studios used cool things like tube compressors, preamps, plate reverbs and actual echo chambers that were used and abused by recording engineers usually prompted by inventive players to get sounds that were different than anything else that had come before. These effects were The effects were generally (but not always) 19″ across. and mounted in large racks standing taller than the musicians themselves. The racks were essentially pieces of furniture, and the individual effects were mounted inside of them, much like the modern studio picture at the top of this article. Knobs and settings were in the front, and the back of the rack contained all of the wiring to the mixing board. It wasn’t unusual to have some poor engineer trying to make sense of the mess of wires in the back of such equipment racks. Each effect was designed for a specific purpose, and those pesky rock musicians were always asking, “What if we hook this one into that one? It isn’t supposed to do that? Just try. Tell them I asked you. Stop crying. I’ll take the blame.”

Fast Forward About 20 Years…

While both pedals and studio rack effects developed and matured, guitarists started thinking more like engineers. Instead of having small pedals in front of their feet, what if they had more advanced effects in a studio rack? Better yet, what if they brought these advanced studio processors on tour with them! They would have to get some sort of case to bring them in, sure, but then they would have that elusive sound that pedals just could not get at that time.

Big bands such as Pink Floyd started touring with more advanced guitar equipment, and brought the equipment that they used in the studio on tour with them. Special rack cases were built, and they were loaded up with equipment that was never designed to leave the recording studio. Of course, things broke, and fixed on tour. However, soon manufacturers started building more robust gear. Guitarists could keep their equipment in the back of the stage and control it with remote controllers.

Ahead Another 10 years…

Guitarists were naturally influenced by the bands they saw, so eventually the average guitarist wanted a rack of their own. By the mid-1980’s, pedals seemed to be losing popularity, as rack effects were all over stages and the pages of guitar magazines. Up until then, a rack effect had a very specific purpose. If it was a compressor, it would be set to a specific sound. If you needed another sound for another song, you needed another compressor to switch in, usually using complex relays. However, soon, the idea of presets and midi soon became commonplace. Presets allowed one effect to have many different settings, which were stored in the device itself. Midi was a system of messages that could control and change different effects. Now you didn’t need a special rack delay for a long echo and another one for a short echo. You could have one unit, and just switch sounds with a pedal sending different midi messages to each device. With one button press, you could change the echo time, turn on a chorus, turn off the wah, and crank up the distortion. While this sort of thing is obvious and commonplace now, it wasn’t so in the era of you get what you get and like it.

It All Comes Crashing Down

As technology trickled down to consumer level, the quality suffers just like in any industry. Cheaper rack effects contained thousands of sounds, but hardly the one you wanted. Plus, those of us without roadies had to lift these racks and transport them. We had to learn how to program each effect too, and when multi-effects became common, we had to program strings of effects on tiny LCD screens. If something wasn’t right when playing live, you couldn’t just reach down and turn a knob. And if you loved the delay sound, but hated the chorus sound, you compromised…or bought another piece of equipment. After a good run, guitarists turned their back to the rack and started chaining together pedals again. By the mid-1990’s, pawn shops couldn’t give rack equipment away as a new boutique pedal market flourished.

Rack Attack II: The Rackening

Everything old is new again, and guitarists are once again discovering racks. Equipment such as Fractal Audio’s Axe-FX II and Kemper’s Profiler have brought back the rack. These companies keep the quality high and leave the problems of old effects in the dust. Current rack-based effects do a lot more than just a bunch of effects too. They use computer modeling to allow you to build an entire rig, from effects to amplifier. Processing power today is thousands of times more powerful than what was available 30 years ago.

These days, pedals and rack effects can live together in any guitar rig. Guitar gear has evolved, and that evolution gives us choices. It isn’t a case of one or the other anymore. Just try out lots of gear, and get the right tool for the job. Yes, you might have to do a little bit of research, but that research includes a lot of playing. Not too bad, huh?