D-DAY
“The Super Distortion was the first readily available replacement pickup – uptake was huge”
We’re a fickle bunch, aren’t we? A common topic in these pages is how we’re all influenced by brand, its musical genre association, by specification and, I’ll add another, name. If I suggested you try a Full Shredder, Total Metal or Super Gain humbucker for your clean jazz tones, you’d laugh.
When I was writing about Mike Stern’s long-running Yamaha signature last year, checking out the pickups and circuit I was rather surprised to find a Seymour Duncan ’59 humbucker in the neck position paired with a single coil-sized Hot Rails at the bridge, wired not in series but parallel. Pot values for the volume and tone were nominally 250kohms – they actually measured 240k ohms (volume) and 237k (tone). Chatting to Mike, it was pretty clear he didn’t have a clue what actual pickups were in his guitar and had simply listened to prototypes provided by Yamaha until he found what sounded right. Hundreds of gigs later, not to mention recordings, it clearly works for him. It could be
