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You’d expect a guy with such legendary chops to have killer axes, and Skaggs is a connoisseur. He told me that in his studio currently he’s got fifteen amazing guitars strewn around that he’s using on a new solo project (Songs My Father Loved, Skaggs Family Records, release date to be determined). Recently he’s been involved in the design and production of some of the most amazing guitars ever made: the Bourgeois Ricky Skaggs Limited Edition and the new acoustics from PRS.
Eager to talk about pickin’, guitars and gear, Skaggs was a peach to interview.
You and I went to the same kind of bootcamp/ university, learning to play music by playing music, sitting in a circle with a bunch of other pickers and learning from them, imitating what they do. How did all that happen for you?
Well, I was singing before I was playing, listening to my mother. She was a great singer, a great old mountain voice, almost like Hazel Dickens on steroids, so pure and so mountain. Of course my dad was a singer, too, so I was singing with them a couple years before I started playing, in church when I was three years old. I remember my mother carrying me up and putting me on the pulpit with my little ol’ legs danglin’ down, and I would sing harmony with her and dad. So my dad bought me a mandolin when I was five, but it really freaked him out—he bought me a mandolin and he had to go back to work, and then he got snowed in in Ohio for two weeks. When he came back home after two weeks, I was singing and playing and changing chords at the same time, and he really hadn’t shown me how to change chords on the mandolin. He showed me G, C and D, that was all he knew on the mandolin. I just had a gift to be able to hear that it needed to follow wherever the singin’ was gonna go.
So, I’ve been exposed to that music all my life, and there’s nothing, nothing nothing that can take the place of exposure. All the training, all the sight-reading—I don’t read music. I can read a chord chart a little bit, but I don’t read music and I wish I did. I really do think that it could be a wonderful blessing to me if I could.
But, there’s nothing to take the place of exposure… sitting around in a circle, and when it’s your time to play you play something, and you learn to honor and don’t sit there and play solos all night long. You learn to play rhythm, too, while somebody else is soloing. Playing in front of people causes other people to encourage you and build you up, other than your dad and mom. When you hear encouragement from another musician, a musician that you admire—like when Bill Monroe did what he did for me when I was six years old, or Earl Scruggs hearing me at age seven backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and then inviting me down for an audition for their television show—those kinds of things… there’s nothing that can take the place of that kind of environment to grow up around, a community of musicians.
I sweat a lot at home practicing! [Laughs]
I doubt that very much! Your mandolin tone is chimey, it has that church bell vibe, but your Tele sound was so soft and buttery—how did you develop that tone?
Well, I really wasn’t even around electric guitar players. There was a friend of mine who had a Silvertone guitar with a Bigsby tailpiece on it, and I would borrow that guitar and bring it to my house and play Ventures songs on it. I had very, very limited experience with electric instruments back in my early childhood. But when I started working with Emmylou [Harris], Albert Lee was in the band, and of course James Burton had recorded a lot of her stuff and had been in her band before that. So when I started travelling with Emmylou, I was really getting to watch Albert a lot. His tone is in his hands, though—he could play through the smallest Princeton, or he could play through a Fender Dual Reverb and it would sound the same. His tone is just in his right hand, he’s got great sounding hands, and so does James. Amps work for them, but it’s really all in the hands.
And that’s really funny, because I asked Mr. Monroe one time why his mandolin sounded so good and he stuck his hands out and said, “Ah, these hands.” [Laughs] But when I started my own band, I hired a great guitar player name of Ray Flacke. I had met Ray over in England when I was with Emmylou. He was a friend of Albert’s, and he was playing an old Lab Series. I think it had one 15 in it, the L9 I believe— it had this little compression knob. When he left the band we needed a guitar player, and I wanted to hire somebody. I couldn’t hire Albert Lee because he was working with Clapton, and I couldn’t afford James Burton. We had two weeks worth of touring to do up in Canada, and so my wife Sharon said, “Ricky, I’ve heard you play electric guitar. I know you can do this.”
Well, I had a Telecaster-style guitar that Joe Glaser had built me, and it had a string bender in it, ‘cause I loved that string bender sound that Albert had when he played on some of my early records—like “Head Over Heels In Love With You” from the Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown record. I set down with my records and started learning Ray’s solos, like “Highway 40 Blues,” and the intro to “Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown” that Albert had played on. I learned the intros and turnarounds to about 10 or 15 songs that really had to have that electric guitar sound or we wouldn’t be able to be true to the song so much. Within a week I had learned these solos good enough to go out and do that two-week tour, and I tell you what, I was scared to death! Walking out there plugged in to an amp… I had some L9s at the warehouse, so going on the road, taking that Fender guitar, pluggin’ in and bein’ the electric guitar player for the band… I said “What are you doin’? This is stupid! This is suicide! Here’s fifteen-thousand people who are gonna know the difference— they’re gonna know you’re green as a gourd.” So I went out there and played “Honey Open that Door,” and I didn’t blow it! I made it! I played the solo and the crowd cheered, and I thought, “Oh my God, I made it through that... thank you God!” So when it come time to kick off “Highway 40 Blues” with the steel guitar player and all [sings intro], I made it through that. For two weeks I got to play every night, and then I did that for probably three or four years before I hired a full-time electric guitar player for the band, so I could just focus again on singin’ and playin’ the acoustic guitar… it’s really hard to play the backup fills that the guitar needed to play while I was singing. So, going from mandolin to Tele was quite a challenge but I loved it—I really did. I miss it, I miss playing the electric guitar.
But we have just released some of my old country hits from CBS/Epic, and we’re re-releasing all of them on Skaggs Family Records, so I’m probably going to end up draggin’ my ‘57 Tele out and startin’ to play it again, and I’m lookin’ forward to that, I think it’ll be fun. We’ll still be doing bluegrass... but instead of doing bluegrass as part of the country show, we’re gonna do some country as part of a bluegrass show!
Let’s talk about recording. You’ve gone from the simple, standing-around-a-micwith- four-guys-completely-live, to major productions in big studios with every kind of gear imaginable. How has that whole spectrum influenced the way you record now?
Well, I have learned a lot over many years of recording. I’ve done it both ways. I first started recording with Ralph Stanley when I was 16. We went direct to quarter-inch tape, direct to stereo. If we got a good take, then that was the cut; if we messed up, we’d do it over. But we wouldn’t labor over it—and the band was good, especially Ralph and the guys. Keith [Whitley] and I was the add-ons, the new kids, so God help us to not mess up! I guess once I got with Boone Creek, our music was changing and evolving, and we started doing more overdubs there. We were wanting more separation, so that if someone did mess something up, we could go back and fix it without destroying the integrity of the track.
I guess it was probably when I went with Emmylou Harris that I started growing as a producer and studio musician. Emmylou’s husband at the time, Brian Ahern, was a brilliant producer. I learned so much from him, watching what he did. It wasn’t that he was telling me stuff, I was just always watchin’ and trying to learn why he made this choice, why he made this decision musically. He was like a P.T. Barnum, calling it out, “You play this… you play this… if you play this together with him, it’ll create this sound, and drums you stop here and go to high-hat…” I was learning so much from him, musically and sonically, the mics he was using and that kind of thing.
But after leaving Emmylou, I came to Nashville. I had produced all this music for Sugar Hill Records in NC, a small indie label. I was sittin’ on an airplane next to a major label exec, and I played him some of my stuff ‘cause he asked to hear it, and he flipped out. He played it for the execs at Capitol in Nashville, and they loved it, but the guy in Los Angeles who had to sign off didn’t like it. So, the guy from the Nashville Capitol office made one phone call to Rick Blackburn at Epic. And so I drive down the street half a block and walk in at Epic and play the stuff for him. He said, “Who produced that?” “I did.” “It’s great. I love it.” I said, “That’s part of the deal. I want to be able to produce my own music, if that’s possible.” Here was this brand new, unproven, unheard-of artist, and so I had to make good records—I knew I had to. They had to sound good, they had to work good, they had to come in on budget and on time, so I had to grow up pretty quick.
Sometimes I’ll go into a vocal booth and sing and maybe even play to where they can hear the groove that I’m hearin’, and then I’ll go back in and fix my guitar and fix my vocal again. But we try to get fiddle, mandolin, acoustic guitar and bass—and many times banjo, if we’re cutting a track that needs a banjo. In my studio, we don’t have a whole lot of booths; most the stuff is right out in one big, open room and it sounds great. We got big thick, dense foam that’s like 8 feet long and maybe 4 to 5 feet wide, and we set them on their side and we sort of build ourselves in a little den there so we have some separation and we’ll cut thataway.
You’ve recently been involved with the creation of a couple of amazing acoustic guitars, the Bourgeois Ricky Skaggs Limited Edition and the new Paul Reed Smith acoustics, the Tonare Grand and the Angelus. You’ve had a long relationship with Dana Bourgeois, but how did you get involved with PRS?
Almost four years ago now, Paul Reed Smith came to me and brought me some really rough prototypes—they were very, very prototype, but he brought them to me anyway. He said, “I’ve called around the country and I’ve asked a lot of musicians, ‘If I was gonna create a great acoustic guitar, who should I get to walk with me through this process?’ and your name kept coming up as the guy to get in touch with, so I’m just bringing these before you so you can look at ‘em.” So I looked at ‘em and saw that they were a little thinner bodywise than the Bourgeois dreadnoughts and Martins that I’d been playing—but boy, when I strummed the instrument the first time the thing just jumped out of my hands. I realized right then that they were really on to something.
I said, “We gotta find something that sounds good, plays good and looks good, and all your electric guitars play great, so you’ve got that part of it down. We just gotta make sure that part gets transferred to the necks of these acoustic guitars.” So many times, you know, you find a great-sounding acoustic guitar and the neck is just hard to play—it’s not friendly. At 55 years old, I don’t want to have to be working to play an
| RICKY'S GEARBOX Acoustic Guitars: PRS Tonare Grand Bourgeois D150 Bourgeois Ricky Skaggs Limited Edition Bourgeois OM 1931 Gibson L5 Archtop 1959 Martin D28 1942 Martin 000-21 Herringbone 1935 National Dobro Guitar Electric Guitars: 1957 Fender Telecaster Gretsch Country Gentleman Danelectro 6-String Baritone Amps: Fender Dual Professional Fender Twin Fender Princeton Lab Series L9 Effects: MXR Flanger EchoPlex Roland Space Echo |
What about the Bourgeois?
We talked about doin’ a signature model a couple years ago, and I said, “Well, let’s think about doin’ something that’s a dreadnought, like a D150, but really dressed out, beautiful to look at, wonderful to play, something that would be like a collector’s item. We don’t want to do a D45, but if you could do a Bourgeois to the nth degree, what would you want to do?” So we talked about AAA fancy Brazillian rosewood sides and back, really choice Adirondack spruce tops. And we wanted to dress the tuning keys up, so I think there’s ‘RS’ on all the tuning keys. He said, what would I think about a fossilized ivory bridge, and I said I thought it’d be beautiful. I saw an old parlor guitar years ago that had an old pickguard with some silver wire in it, and it was just gorgeous, but he told me about silver wire and how hard it is to get in there. But also, as the years go and these pickguards shrink and expand, that wire gets loose and starts to raise up, so it’s kind of hard on the player. Then we talked and decided we’d just do pearl inlay; that’ll just expand with the pickguard. I think we came up with something really pretty, and it’s not overdone, it’s not understated, and they’re great-sounding guitars. It records so well. And we just did ten of these guitars… I think we only have maybe two or three left to sell now. There’s nobody makes a better dreadnought bluegrass acoustic guitar than Dana Bourgeois. I just think his sound, the playability of these guitars, especially for bluegrass style, they’re just great guitars for that.
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.”
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.