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Seymour Duncan Pickup Stories

by Premier Guitar

Seymour Duncan tells about his first pickup repair, developing pickups for Jeff Beck, alnico magnets, and fixing Blackie.
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Fort Wayne, IN (June 5, 2008) -- It's a rare opportunity to get to listen to an industry pioneer riff on both his early days and the technical aspects of his work. This is exactly what we were treated to with Seymour Duncan at GearFest. Here's a few video highlights of his hour-long talk.

First, Seymour told the harrowing tale of his first pickup repair. The moral of the story? Don't let anyone borrow your guitar!



Then, he recounts working with Jeff Beck to develop his very first humbucker:



Seymour also worked with Eric Clapton on Blackie; he shares his experience on how different tolerance potentiometers changed the sound of the guitar:



He also talked about Alnico magnets and what different magnets do to your tone, and how he used a toy train to learn about DC voltage:


For more on GearFest, check out our wrapup. For more on Seymour Duncan, visit SeymourDuncan.com.

     



Comments

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bronica102
on 07/18/2008 		Sailor: how can you call him a moron and he plays guitar so well too. He's build and worked on guitars for Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Johnson, Robben Ford, Roy Buchanan, Albert Collins, Freddy King, ZZ Top, The Ventures, Jimmy Page, Friends with Les Paul. and you call him a moron. I do smell LOTS of jealousy here. You can hear him on myspace/seymourwd
rick hudson
on 06/10/2008 		Just because the guy works mostly off intuition doesn't make him a moron. Besides, his ears are very likely more precise than any multimeter could ever be.
jill avery
on 06/09/2008 		Seymour is a genius. He personally transformed my gibson blueshawk (formerly sounded terrible) into a gem that i can't stop playing.
Now the tone is really sweet, warm,and powerful, has the vintage style P90's in it and a few wiring tricks Seymour invented as well. Amazing. thanks sey.
Sir Noose
on 06/09/2008 		Seymours no moron (I smell some jealousy here :-)
He was just a guy that was first doing what he's doing. He was pretty good at it too, and he was at the right place at the right time - meeting the right players to work with.
He's got god ears and has developed some nice pickups through the years, although I'm not a fan of the JB at all.
Sailor
on 06/09/2008 		It's amazing this moron has made as much money as he has made with all the stupid shit he says about pickups and pots etc. But there are many in this industry like him so it is not all that unusual.
BillyBobBuckNasty
on 06/06/2008 		It's because these are all separate youtube videos. Besides, she's hot and I'd personally like to see more of her!
Guitarboy Jim
on 06/05/2008 		Do we really have to hear Rebecca's intro at the beginning of each video? She's fine, but why not just put her at the beginning of the first one?



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