Over the course of an evening last October, I got to witness the wide range of Jeff Parker’s musical world. Early in the night, I stood in an empty parking lot in Center City Philadelphia with a few hundred other folks, looking down upon a freshly landscaped abandoned parcel that was temporarily converted into a bandstand as part of a month-long public art project. Joshua Abrams’ eight-piece Natural Information Society, featuring Parker on guitar, performed a slow, meditative set of repetitive, looping figures in search of a transcendent goal. Parker’s soft tone blended with the timbres of Abrams’ guembri (a 3-stringed bass lute) and Jason Adasiewicz’s vibraphone, helping to create a warm body of harmony.
After finishing his section of the hours-long piece, Parker quickly packed up and made his way about a mile-and-a-half down Spring Garden Street to the Ruba Club, where he took the stage with drummer Makaya McCraven’s quartet to a sold-out house as part of the October Revolution festival. In a set of climactic improvisations and hard-hitting beats, McCraven’s groove-based, hip-hop-inspired jazz stood in distinct aesthetic contrast to Abrams’ slowly unfolding minimalism. It was one of the most ripping sets I’ve heard Parker play. He took lots of burning solos, evoking his bluesy, soul-jazz side within a modern context and leading the band through a series of musical peaks.
Switching between such seemingly divergent sounds is nothing new for the 52-year-old who has worked with a wide array of artists over the course of his career. He’s probably best known for his membership in post-rock pioneers Tortoise, and as a sideman with Joey DeFrancesco, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Joshua Redman. Parker’s also a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). But hearing the distinctly contrasting sounds of these two sets revealed something remarkable: Parker has established a personal voice so clear and so strong that he manages to make himself heard and recognized in any group—while always contributing to the vibe.
Hear “Fusion Swirl” from Jeff Parker’s newest full-length, Suite for Max Brown.
Though he’s been honing his sound for several decades, it now seems Parker has reached a new plateau in his career, starting with the creation of his 2016 release, The New Breed. On that album, Parker pulls together all of the interests and inspirations he’d alluded to in his past work, using hip-hop production and heavy sampling to create tracks with funky, sometimes herky-jerky rhythms that combine with live instruments performing composed figures and improvisations. These tracks find Parker drifting toward subtle minimalism, as well as asserting soulful solos to create colorful and engaging music where his guitar is at the center of a much larger sonic world.
In January, Parker released his follow-up, Suite for Max Brown. Created using the same type of studio process as The New Breed, it shows a natural progression that, along with his 2018 single “Blackman,” gives a big picture of the New Breed project. What Parker is creating isn’t guitar music; it’s studio-based composition that draws on all aspects of his voice. Across groove-centric tracks like “Fusion Swirl,” the loose and sprawling “3 for L,” the ethereal “Metamorphoses,” and his warm and meditative take on John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” Suite for Max Brown is the logical next step forward from The New Breed—an expression of an innovative sound that belongs wholly to Parker.
PG caught up with Parker at his Los Angeles home where he was briefly resting between legs of his tour with the New Breed band.
How is the New Breed project different from your previous work?
The New Breed is my way of merging my interest in hip-hop production with improvising. It became a specific way I put together music. For the new record, I’m employing the same kind of techniques and using a lot of the same musicians, but my interests have changed and broadened a little bit in the last couple years and it’s more reflective of where I am now, but using the same process as the first New Breed album.
How would you say your interests have changed between albums?
I’m more into longer loops and make more of the music by myself now, and I’m in a bit more of a meditative state. On the new album, there’s not as much of me trying to blend improvising with the music. It’s more of me just trying to make weird shit. With the first New Breed album, that’s what I was trying to do: mix my interest in hip-hop production with an improvising jazz group. On this, there’s some of that, but not as much.
How did forming the New Breed band inform the music you made on Suite for Max Brown?
This is a follow-up to The New Breed, so it made sense for me to use the same people. The way I choose who to play with is, the people who I think understand where I’m coming from and view themselves as musicians in the modern age in a similar way to myself.
Not everyone, though. [Drummer] Jay Bellerose is a pretty old-school dude. He’s the person you know who has only had a cell phone for two years, barely has a computer, isn’t on social media, and only plays drums from the ’30s. But everyone else is interested in a lot of different things related to merging these worlds of digital and analog music, and is interested in production, and has a pretty broad perspective of the musical landscape in general.
This fall I saw you play two sets in two venues on the same night in Philadelphia. You keep busy with other people’s projects and there seems to be a lot of overlap between musicians in those groups and in your group.
I play side gigs with all kinds of people. Ever since I started making my own music, I’ve always followed this idea of what it means to be a musician as the circumstances change. A lot of it is based in being practical, like making a living, and to be flexible and be open, and also what you can learn from these situations. The more situations you put yourself in, the more experience you have to draw from. If you look at it the right way, it just makes you a better musician.
TIDBIT: Parker explains his album-making process: “I’m a composer first. I have a framework and I assemble the musicians and we record it and improvise off the compositions, and then I try to blend everything together after that.”
Nowadays, musicians have to do everything. You have to produce and engineer your own recordings, and you have to learn how to sample and set up digital music libraries. This is stuff I’ve been interested in my whole career, probably for 30 years at this point. Ever since I heard A Tribe Called Quest in the golden era of hip-hop, my relationship to jazz music really changed. It didn’t just feel like my parents’ music; it felt like something I could relate to as a 20-year-old kid. I started to figure out how they were making that music—sampling it from old records—and it changed the way you’d play, your phrasing, playing with MCs, playing loops over and over again live.
I tend to connect with musicians who are interested in exploring things the same as myself. Makaya sought me out as a mentor when he moved to Chicago because he saw I was DJ-ing, playing with Tortoise, doing all this free-improv stuff, making beats, making my own in-the-cracks records. When he moved to Chicago, I was one of the first musicians he wanted to find and, since then, we’ve become peers. We exchange ideas and I love what he brings to my music, just like he likes what I bring to his.
It sounds like you’re both coming at things from a different angle but achieving similar results.
We make our music in opposite ways. He records improvisations and then samples it and cuts it up and makes compositions out of it. With me, I’m a composer first. I have a framework and I assemble the musicians and we record it and improvise off the compositions, and then I try to blend everything together after that.
How did you come up with the process for creating the music on The New Breed? I imagine you created samples and wrote melodies and guitar lines to build off of those?
Yeah, that’s one way. I also would sample a whole song and re-create it from that. I’d take a song, chop it into pieces and it becomes something else. That’s how the song “Gnarciss” is.
Basically, I use the recording process as a way to make compositions. I don’t so much write music with pen and paper anymore. I kind of removed that part of writing music.
Parker’s highest profile gig is with the post-rock experimentalists Tortoise. Here, he’s onstage with the band at London’s the Roundhouse on June 15, 2018, brandishing his favorite guitar, a 1983 Gibson ES-335 Dot Reissue. Photo by Sara Amroussi Gilissen
What is it about a song that motivates you to sample or re-create it?
If it inspires me to put it in a different context. Once you start making beats, you develop a producer’s ear, so if you hear a recording, parts of it might stick out and make you start thinking about what it would sound like if you sampled it and chopped it up and rearranged it in certain ways. If it inspires you to manipulate it … that’s pretty much all it is.
As a leader with your trio and quartet, you’ve made albums that are essentially jazz recordings. How is your role as a player different in the New Breed project?
There’s less emphasis on the guitar playing. This is more me composing and flexing different brain muscles. It’s a weird thing for me to say, but I’m not that interested in playing the guitar right now. I still enjoy it, but I’m more interested in exploring different settings I can create to put my guitar in, and I create that with this New Breed project.
I’m more interested in the general space that I can make for my music, sonically and in a social landscape of music, whereas the trio and quartet records were more about me trying to make interesting jazz guitar music, improvising with my friends and exploring that world: songs, tunes, head-solo-head—much more about improvising together and more of a live thing. The New Breed project is more studio-based and is more about the record. Not that [Parker’s earlier albums] Like-Coping, The Relatives, and Bright Light in Winter were not about trying to make a good record.
When you present New Breed with the live band, is it more related to a collective ensemble vibe or getting across what’s on the album?
It’s both. We try and make faithful representations of what’s on the record, but open it up in a way that it sounds spontaneous. I think we do a pretty good job. At the end of the tour we just finished, the band was sounding pretty great. I think it’s a convincing synthesis of improvising and studio music.
On “Fusion Swirl,” is that feedback that rings throughout the song?
It’s not feedback, it’s a Freeze pedal. That’s the best guitar pedal ever, if you ask me. I’ve been waiting for that pedal for 30 years.
At the end of that track, you play a cool buzzy figure. How did you make that sound?
That’s actually digital distortion. It’s a super-hot digital signal, but the performance was really good, and I was like, “Damn, I need to use it!” So I turned it down and it’s a cool tone, but it wasn’t the original tone of the recording. It’s a mistake. That’s how you get some of the best stuff. You can’t be tied to what’s supposed to happen. You’ve gotta be open. I always tell cats, “Be open to the unknown—you’ll surprise yourself.”
The track “3 for L” sounds live. Is that right?
No. That’s an old tune. I probably wrote that over 20 years ago. I’m playing synth bass and guitar on it. Me and Jay [Bellerose] recorded the rhythm section as a duet. I think it’s two layered drum passes with him playing my adult drum set and then a pass on my son’s kid-sized drums, and then he does a pass of percussion—strange sounds like springs and weird shit. Then a month later I recorded the guitar on it with [co-producer and bassist] Paul Bryan in my home studio. It’s my 1950 ES-150 plugged direct into my UA Apollo 8.
The guitar tone has such a warm, live feel.
That guitar sounds amazing. It’s the kind Charlie Christian played. It’s really hard to play. I have it set up as best as I can, but it’s really physical. It has a P-90 and I put flatwound .015s on it.
Guitars
1983 Gibson ES-335 Dot Reissue
1950 Gibson ES-150
Amps
Studious Moseley custom 2x12
Effects
Boomerang Phrase Sampler
Boss FRV-1 Fender Reverb
Boss RV-3 Digital Reverb/Delay
Crowther Hot Cake
DOD FX-17 Wah/Volume
Electro-Harmonix Freeze
Electro-Harmonix Small Stone
Maxon GE-601 Graphic EQ
Moog MF-102 Ring Modulator
ZVEX Fuzz Factory
Strings and Picks
D’Addario EJ22 XL (.013–.056) on ES-335
D’Addario ECG26 Chromes (.013–.056 with .015 for 1st string) on ES-150
Fender Extra Heavy picks
Describe the other guitars and amps you use on Suite for Max Brown.
I play the 150 on “3 for L” and “Gnarciss.” On “Gnarciss,” I’m only playing this kind of arpeggiated part that I wanted a fat tone on because it’s emulating this electric piano part that is in the sample I referenced. All the rest of the record is my 1983 ES-335 Dot—a reissue of the ’59 335. I’ve had it for over 30 years. It’s the one I always play.
Most of it I recorded with my Studious amp, built by Bryant Howe. He makes one called a Moseley, an 18-watt tube combo. It’s normally with one 12", but I like two 12s. It’s cleaner than the one 12", and it has a little more headroom, but it’s still low wattage and records really well.
Other than the Freeze, what pedals are you using?
I’ve had most of the same pedals for 25 years. I add something every once in a while. The Freeze is probably the newest thing. I have a Maxon Graphic EQ; the old Boss RV-3, which I’ve been using since 1986 or something; the Boss Fender FRV-1, which is a pedal version of the Fender reverb tank; a ZVEX Fuzz Factory; a Small Stone classic phaser; the Crowther Hot Cake, which is my normal distortion; the Moogerfooger ring modulator MF-102, and my DOD FX-17 wah-volume pedal.
I also have the same Boomerang Phrase Sampler I’ve had since 1999. The thing I like about it is that I can put stuff in it and trigger it. It is a looper, but it really is more of a sampler, and I can trigger it and improvise along. That’s what I did on “Go Away.” I sampled those riffs and I’m triggering them in real time and improvising along with myself.
My pedalboard was wired up by Gil Divine at Divine Noise. He has a great cable company in Portland and he was Ira Kaplan’s [of Yo La Tengo] guitar tech for probably 20 years. He rewired my whole pedalboard and it looks amazing. It has that Strymon Zuma [power supply], which is the best, since it switches voltages automatically, so if you’re touring the world, you don’t have to worry about blowing your shit up.
The New Breed is dedicated to your father. Suite for Max Brown is dedicated to and named after your mother, and your daughter, Ruby, sings with you. What does the personal nature of these albums and the relationship to your family mean to you?
I’m just trying to put myself out there as an artist. I’m trying to be honest with the stuff that I’m dealing with. I think it’s important now for people to be honest with the stuff that they’re trying to do. A lot of it, I do it for me, just to prove to myself that I can do certain things. I’m playing drums on my record. I’m like the worst drummer in the world, but I did it because I’m just trying to make music.
The New Breed was so well-received by some people, I felt bad. I wished that my father could have seen the tribute to him, so that’s why this record, I wanted to make it a tribute to my mom while she’s still around to see it, and she loves it.
I don’t really make vocal music, but I’ve been recording songs with my daughter since she was 4 or 5. I was working on the song “Cliche” on The New Breed, and it was instrumental and it wasn’t really coming together. I thought, what if I wrote some lyrics and got somebody to sing on it? When I thought about who I’d get to sing on it, it was a no-brainer: I’d get Ruby to do it. It’s cool, she’s into it, her friends dig it, so I figured let’s keep it flowing. We just work on stuff whenever we find time. So I guess it is personal, but it mostly is me just trying to be honest.
Dig Jeff Parker’s layered riffage courtesy of his Boomerang Phrase Sampler on this live version of Suite for Max Brown’s “Go Away.” Parker’s playing slowly morphs into a more soloistic improvisation at around 3 minutes, and he creates a loose vibe over a tight groove by weaving between improvising and the main figure.
A mix of futuristic concepts and DeArmond single-coil pickups, the Musicraft Messenger’s neck was tuned to resonate at 440 Hz.
Until its untimely end, Musicraft made roughly 250 Messengers in various configurations: the mono-output Messenger and the flagship Messenger Stereophonic, both of which could come with the “Tone Messer” upgrade, a built-in distortion/fuzz circuit. The company’s first catalog also featured a Messenger Bass, a wireless transmitter/receiver, and various models of its Messenger Envoy amplifier, very few of which have survived, if many were ever made at all.
“To this day, even fans will sometimes call the decision to use DeArmonds the Messenger’s ‘Achilles’ heel.’”
Upon its release, the Messenger was a mix of futuristic concepts and DeArmond single-coil pickups that were more likely to be found on budget instruments than pricier guitars such as these. The Messengers often featured soapbar-style DeArmonds, though some sported a diamond grille. (To this day, even fans will sometimes call the decision to use DeArmonds the Messenger’s “Achilles’ heel.”) The Stereophonic model, like the one featured in this edition of Vintage Vault, could be plugged into a single amplifier as normal, or you could split the bridge and neck pickup outputs to two separate amps.
One of the beloved hallmarks of the guitars are their magnesium-aluminum alloy necks, which continue as a center block straight through the tailpiece, making the guitars relatively lightweight and virtually immune to neck warping, while enhancing their playability. Thanks to the strength of that metal-neck design, there’s no need for a thick heel where it meets the body, granting unprecedented access to the higher end of the fretboard.
This Stereophonic model could be plugged into a single amplifier as normal, or you could split the bridge and neck pickup outputs to two separate amps.
The neck was apparently also tuned to have a resonant frequency of 440 Hz, which, in all honesty, may be some of that 1967 “whoa, man” marketing continuing on through our modern-day guitar discourse, where this fact is still widely repeated on forums and in YouTube videos. (As one guitar aficionado to the next, what does this even mean in practice? Would an inaudible vibration at that frequency have any effect at all on the tone of the guitar?)
In any event, the combination of that metal center block—resonant frequency or not—the apple-shaped hollow wooden body of the guitar, and the cat’s-eye-style “f-holes” did make it prone to gnarly fits of feedback, especially if you engaged the Tone Messer fuzz and blasted it all through the high-gain amp stacks favored by the era’s hard rockers.
The most famous devotee of the Messenger was Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner, who used the guitar—and its Tone Messer circuitry—extensively on the group’s string of best-selling records and in their defining live shows, like the Atlanta Pop Festival 1970 and their sold-out run at New York’s Shea Stadium in 1971. But even Farner had some misgivings.
The Messengers often featured soapbar-style DeArmonds, though some sported a diamond grille.
In a 2009 interview, he talked about his first test-run of the guitar: “After I stuffed it full of foam and put masking tape over the f-holes to stop that squeal, I said, ‘I like it.’” He bought it for $200, on a $25-per-pop installment plan, a steal even at the time. (He also made it over with a psychedelic paint job, befitting the era, and experimented with different pickups over the years.)
When these guitars were new in 1967, the Messenger Stereophonic in morning sunburst, midnight sunburst, or mojo red would have run you $340. By 1968, new stereo models started at $469.50. Recent years have seen prices for vintage models steadily increase, as the joy of this rarity continues to thrill players and collectors. Ten years ago, you could still get them for about $1,500, but now prices range from $3,000 to $6,000, depending on condition.
Our Vintage Vault pick today is listed on Reverb by Chicago’s own SS Vintage. Given that it’s the stereo model, in very good condition, and includes the Tone Messer upgrade, its asking price of $5,495 is near the top-end for these guitars today, but within the usual range. To those readers who appreciate the vintage vibe but don’t want the vintage price tag, Eastwood Guitars offers modern reissues, and eagle-eyed buyers can also find some very rare but less expensive vintage MIJ clones made in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Sources: Reverb listing from SS Vintage, Reverb Price Guide sales data, Musicraft July 1, 1967 Price Schedule, 1968 Musicraft Catalog, Chicago Music Exchange’s “Uncovering The Secret Sounds of the 1967 Musicraft Messenger Guitar,” MusicPickups.com article on the Messenger.Submarine Pickups boss Pete Roe at his workstation.
Still, we think we know what pickups should sound and look like. Lucky for us, there have always been plenty of pickup builders who aren’t so convinced. These are the makers who devised the ceramic-magnet pickup, gold-foils, and active, high-gain pickups. In 2025, nearly 100 years after the first pickup bestowed upon a humble lap-steel guitar the power to blast our ears with soundwaves, there’s no shortage of free-thinking, independent wire-winders coming up with new ways to translate vibrating steel strings into thrilling music.
Joe Naylor, Chris Mills, and Pete Roe are three of them. As the creative mind behind Reverend Guitars, Naylor developed the Railhammer pickup, which combines both rail and pole-piece design. Mills, in Pennsylvania, builds his own ZUZU guitars with wildly shaped, custom-designed pickups. And in the U.K., Roe developed his own line of hexaphonic pickups to achieve the ultimate in string separation and note definition. All three of them told us how they created their novel noisemakers.
Joe Naylor - Railhammer Pickups
Joe Naylor, pictured here, started designing Railhammers out of personal necessity: He needed a pickup that could handle both pristine cleans and crushing distortion back to back.
Like virtually all guitar players, Joe Naylor was on a personal tone quest. Based in Troy, Michigan, Naylor helped launch Reverend Guitars in 1996, and in the late ’90s, he was writing and playing music that involved both clean and distorted movements in one song. He liked his neck pickup for the clean parts, but it was too muddy for high-gain playing. He didn’t want to switch pickups, which would change the sound altogether.
He set out to design a neck pickup that could represent both ends of the spectrum with even fidelity. That led him to a unique design concept: a thin, steel rail under the three thicker, low-end strings, and three traditional pole pieces for the higher strings, both working with a bar magnet underneath. At just about a millimeter thick, rails, Naylor explains, only interact with a narrow section of the thicker strings, eliminating excess low-end information. Pole pieces, at about six millimeters in diameter, pick up a much wider and less focused window of the higher strings, which works to keep them fat and full. “If you go back and look at some of the early rail pickups—Bill Lawrence’s and things like that—the low end is very tight,” says Naylor. “It’s almost like your tone is being EQ’d perfectly, but it’s being done by the pickup itself.”
That idea formed the basis for Railhammer Pickups, which began official operations in 2012. Naylor built the first prototype in his basement, and it sounded great from the start, so he expanded the format to a bridge pickup. That worked out, too. “I decided, ‘Maybe I’m onto something here,’” says Naylor. Despite the additional engineering, Railhammers have remained passive pickups, with fairly conventional magnets—including alnico 5s and ceramics—wires, and structures. Naylor says this combines the clarity of active pickups with the “thick, organic tone” of passive pickups.
“It’s almost like your tone is being EQ’d perfectly, but it’s being done by the pickup itself.” —Joe Naylor
The biggest difficulty Naylor faced was in the physical construction of the pickups. He designed and ordered custom molds for the pickup’s bobbins, which cost a good chunk of money. But once those were in hand, the Railhammers didn’t need much fiddling. Despite their size differences, the rail and pole pieces produce level volume outputs for balanced response across all six strings.
Naylor’s formula has built a significant following among heavy-music players. Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan is a Railhammer player with several signature models; ditto Reeves Gabrels, the Cure guitarist and David Bowie collaborator. Bob Balch from Fu Manchu and Kyle Shutt from the Sword have signatures, too, and other players include Code Orange’s Reba Meyers, Gogol Bordello’s Boris Pelekh, and Voivod’s Dan “Chewy” Mongrain.
Chris Mills - ZUZU Pickups
When Chris Mills started building his own electric guitars, he decided to build his own components for them, too. He suspected that in the course of the market’s natural thinning of the product herd, plenty of exciting options had been left unrealized. He started working with non-traditional components and winding in non-traditional ways, which turned him on to the idea that things could be done differently. “I learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered,” says Mills.
Eventually, he zeroed in on the particular sound of a 5-way-switch Stratocaster in positions two and four: Something glassy and clear, but fatter and more dimensional. In Mills’ practice, “dimensional” refers to the varying and sometimes simultaneous sound qualities attained from, say, a finger pad versus a fingernail. “I didn’t want just one thing,” says Mills. “I wanted multiple things happening at once.”
Mills wanted something that split the difference between a humbucker’s fullness and the Strat’s plucky verve, all in clean contexts. But he didn’t want an active pickup; he wanted a passive, drop-in solution to maximize appeal. To achieve the end tone, Mills wired his bobbins in parallel to create “interposed signal processing,” a key piece of his patented design. “I found that when I [signal processed] both of them, I got too much of one particular quality, and I wanted that dimensionality that comes with two qualities simultaneously, so that was essential,” explains Mills.
Mills loved the sound of alnico 5 blade magnets, so he worked with a 3D modeling engineer to design plastic bobbins that could accommodate both the blades and the number of turns of wire he desired. This got granular—a millimeter taller, a millimeter wider—until they came out exactly right. Then came the struggle of fitting them into a humbucker cover. Some key advice from experts helped Mills save on space to make the squeeze happen.
Mills’ ZUZUbuckers don’t have the traditional pole pieces and screws of most humbuckers, so he uses the screw holes on the cover as “portholes” looking in on a luxe abalone design. And his patented “curved-coil” pickups feature a unique winding method to mix up the tonal profile while maintaining presence across all frequencies.
“I learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered.” —Chris Mills
Mills has also patented a single-coil pickup with a curved coil, which he developed to get a different tonal quality by changing the relative location of the poles to one another and to the bridge. Within that design is another patented design feature: reducing the number of turns at the bass end of the coil. “Pretty much every pickup maker suggests that you lower the bass end [of the pickup] to compensate for the fact that it's louder than the treble end,” says Mills. “That'll work, but doing so alters the quality and clarity of the bass end. My innovation enables you to keep the bass end up high toward the strings.”
Even Mills’ drop-in pickups tend to look fairly distinct, but his more custom designs, like his curved-coil pickup, are downright baroque. Because his designs don’t rely on typical pickup construction, there aren’t the usual visual cues, like screws popping out of a humbucker cover, or pole pieces on a single-coil pickup. (Mills does preserve a whiff of these ideals with “portholes” on his pickup covers that reveal that pickup below.) Currently, he’s excited by the abalone-shell finish inserts he’s loading on top of his ZUZUbuckers, which peek through the aforementioned portholes.
“It all comes down to the challenge that we face in this industry of having something that’s original and distinctive, and also knowing that with every choice you make, you risk alienating those who prefer a more traditional and familiar look,” says Mills.
Pete Roe - Submarine Pickups
Roe’s stick-on Submarine pickups give individual strings their own miniature pickup, each with discrete, siloed signals that can be manipulated on their own. Ever wanted to have a fuzz only on the treble strings, or an echo applied just to the low-register strings? Submarine can achieve that.
Pete Roe says that at the start, his limited amount of knowledge about guitar pickups was a kind of superpower. If he had known how hard it would be to get to where he is now, he likely wouldn’t have started. He also would’ve worked in a totally different way. But hindsight is 20/20.
Roe was working in singer-songwriter territory and looking to add some bass to his sound. He didn’t want to go down the looping path, so he stuck with octave pedals, but even these weren’t satisfactory for him. He started winding his own basic pickups, using drills, spools of wire, and magnets he’d bought off the internet. Like most other builders, he wanted to make passive pickups—he played lots of acoustic guitar, and his experiences trying to find last-minute replacement batteries for most acoustic pickups left him scarred.
Roe started building a multiphonic pickup: a unit with multiple discrete “pickups” within one housing. In traditional pickups, the vibration from the strings is converted into a voltage in the 6-string-wide coils of wire within the pickup. In multiphonic pickups, there are individual coils beneath each string. That means they’re quite tiny—Roe likens each coil to the size of a Tylenol pill. “Because you’re making stuff small, it actually works better because it’s not picking up signals from adjacent strings,” says Roe. “If you’ve got it set up correctly, there’s very, very little crosstalk.”
With his Submarine Pickups, Roe began by creating the flagship Submarine: a quick-stick pickup designed to isolate and enhance the signals of two strings. The SubPro and SubSix expanded the concept to true hexaphonic capability. Each string has a designated coil, which on the SubPro combine into four separate switchable outputs; the SubSix counts six outputs. The pickups use two mini output jacks, with triple-band male connectors to carry three signals each. Explains Roe: “If you had a two-channel output setup, you could have E, A, and D strings going to one side, and G, B, and E to the other. Or you could have E and A going to one, the middle two strings muted, and the B and E going to a different channel.” Each output has a 3-position switch, which toggles between one of two channels, or mute.
“I’m just saying there’s some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities.” —Pete Roe
This all might seem a little overly complicated, but Roe sees it as a simplification. He says when most people think about their sound, they see its origin in the guitar as fixed, only manipulatable later in the chain via pedals, amp settings, or speaker decisions. “I’m not saying that’s wrong,” says Roe. “I’m just saying there’s some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities which may or may not be useful to you. Our customers tend to be the ones who are curious and looking for something new that they can’t achieve in a different way.
“If each string has its own channel, you can start to get some really surprising effects by using those six channels as a group,” continues Roe. “You could pan the strings across the stereo field, which as an effect is really powerful. You suddenly have this really wide, panoramic guitar sound. But then when you start applying familiar effects to the strings in isolation, you can end up with some really surprising textural sounds that you just can’t achieve in any other way. You can get some very different sounds if you’re applying these distortions to strings in isolation. You can get that kind of lead guitar sound that sort of cuts through everything, this really pure, monophonic sound. That sounds very different because what you don’t get is this thing called intermodulation distortion, which is the muddiness, essentially, that you get from playing chords that are more complex than roots and fifths with a load of distortion.” And despite the powerful hardware, the pickups don’t require any soldering or labor. Using a “nanosuction” technology similar to what geckos possess, the pickups simply adhere to the guitar’s body. Submarine’s manuals provide clear instruction on how to rig up the pickups.
“An analogy I like to use is: Say you’re remixing a track,” explains Roe. “If you get the stems, you can actually do a much better job, because you can dig inside and see how the thing is put together. Essentially, Submarine is doing that to guitars. It’s allowing guitarists and producers to look inside the instrument and rebuild it from its constituent parts in new and exciting ways.”
Slayer guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman formed the original searing 6-string front line of the most brutal band in the land. Together, they created an aggressive mood of malcontent with high-velocity thrash riffs and screeching solos that’ll slice your speaker cones. The only way to create a band more brutal than Slayer would be to animate them, and that’s exactly what Metalocalypse (and Home Movies) creator Brendon Small did.
From his first listen, Small has been a lifetime devotee and thrash-metal expert, so we invited him to help us break down what makes Slayer so great. Together, we dissect King and Hanneman’s guitar styles and list their angriest, most brutal songs, as well as those that create a mood of general horribleness.
This episode is sponsored by EMG Pickups.
Use code EMG100 for 15% off at checkout!
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In continued support of their 3x GRAMMY-nominated album Dark Matter, Pearl Jam will be touring select U.S. cities in April and May 2025.
Pearl Jam’s live dates will start in Hollywood, FL on April 24 and 26 and wrap with performances in Pittsburgh, PA on May 16 and 18. Full tour dates are listed below.
Support acts for these dates will be announced in the coming weeks.
Tickets for these concerts will be available two ways:
- A Ten Club members-only presale for all dates begins today. Only paid Ten Club members active as of 11:59 PM PT on December 4, 2024 are eligible to participate in this presale. More info at pearljam.com.
- Public tickets will be available through an Artist Presale hosted by Ticketmaster. Fans can sign up for presale access for up to five concert dates now through Tuesday, December 10 at 10 AM PT. The presale starts Friday, December 13 at 10 AM local time.
earl Jam strives to protect access to fairly priced tickets by providing the majority of tickets to Ten Club members, making tickets non-transferable as permitted, and selling approximately 10% of tickets through PJ Premium to offset increased costs. Pearl Jam continues to use all-in pricing and the ticket price shown includes service fees. Any applicable taxes will be added at checkout.
For fans unable to use their purchased tickets, Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster will offer a Fan-to-Fan Face Value Ticket Exchange for every city, starting at a later date. To sell tickets through this exchange, you must have a valid bank account or debit card in the United States. Tickets listed above face value on secondary marketplaces will be canceled. To help protect the Exchange, Pearl Jam has also chosen to make tickets for this tour mobile only and restricted from transfer. For more information about the policy issues in ticketing, visit fairticketing.com.
For more information, please visit pearljam.com.