Last November, singer-songwriter and guitarist Ty Segall smashed a toilet with the help of the legendary producer and engineer Steve Albini. Albini pushed the porcelain bowl, emblazoned with Segall’s name, off a loading dock, causing it to shatter into many pieces, and Segall finished off the job with an axe.
Segall’s label, Drag City, posted a video of the act (the YouTube search term is “A Flush Down the Tylet”) to its website without any explanation, but this weirdness was hardly surprising coming from a musician known to perform onstage in an elaborate satanic baby costume.
Segall, a native of Laguna Beach, California, isn’t yet 30. But over the past decade, working solo and with various bands in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, he’s already created an impressive body of work that neatly synthesizes the sounds of his wide-ranging 1960s and ’70s influences: surf and garage rock, and early metal, among others.
Since releasing his self-titled debut in 2008, Segall has played most of the instruments on his albums. He approaches the guitar in an appropriately non-schooled way, getting maximum mileage from a select palette of harmonic and melodic sources, all with great frenzy and groove.
Segall recorded with a full band for the first time on his latest album, which is also called Ty Segall. Joined by guitarist Emmett Kelly, multi-instrumentalist Mikal Cronin, drummer Charles Moothart, and keyboardist Ben Boye, Segall continues to explore pre-1980s sounds on the recording while stretching out with extended jamming and clearly relishing the energy of leading a live band.
I chatted to Segall and Kelly about the period-correct gear they used in creating those sounds, how Albini captured them perfectly in the studio, and how their home state of California plays into all of this.
Let’s start by talking about guitars. You’re both Gibson players.
Ty Segall: Yeah. I play a ’69 Les Paul, but I got it looked at, and supposedly it’s a late ’50s one that just has a ’60s serial number. It’s totally beat to shit, but I love that thing.
What’s your history with that guitar?
Segall: I got it three years ago. Before that, I played a [Fender] Mustang kind of exclusively. I don’t know much about guitars really, and I’m not like a studied guitar player. I wouldn’t say I’m technical or anything, so it’s funny, now going back to the Mustang—realizing it’s a three-quarter scale. It feels like a toy compared to the Les Paul.
What’s it like going from the Mustang to the Les Paul in terms of sounds?
Segall: It’s like a similar thing with how it feels. The Mustang—it’s bright and twangy, whereas the Les Paul is full-bodied, resonant. The sustain is insane compared to the Mustang. It’s like a grown-up’s version of an electric guitar.
For his new album, Segall enlisted the skills of veteran indie-rock producer Steve Albini, who got beefy guitar tones and kept the tracking lean.
Have you found that your style has changed at all since you got the Les Paul?
Segall: With the Mustang, I was super-reliant on the tremolo bridge. There’s no whammy bar or anything on the Les Paul, so I’ve had to step up my actual playing instead of relying on sound effects.
Emmett, talk about your Les Paul.
Emmett Kelly: The guitar I played on the record was a modified ’59 Les Paul Special. Instead of the original P-90 pickups, it had Seymour Duncan Antiquities in it. I actually don’t have that guitar anymore. My main guitar now is a Les Paul with P-90s.
What amps did you use on the record?
Segall: My main squeeze is a ’72 Fender Quad Reverb. I’ve played a lot of Quad Reverbs and the silverface Fenders are all over the place. Some were made by the original crew and some were made by new factory workers, so they can be inconsistent. The one I have just sounds insane. It’s the loudest silverface I’ve ever played. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have that amp. I’d probably stop playing music.
Kelly: I played a ’74 Marshall Artiste—a 100-watt head that’s been modified so that the right channel sounds more like a JMP-style Marshall—with a slant 4x12 closed-back cab.
What about effects?
Segall: I just got the Death By Audio Fuzz War, and I use a phaser pedal as well. I have an old [Electro-Harmonix] Small Stone that I really love. Also, Albini had an EarthQuaker Devices Grand Orbiter phaser that was really cool, too. The Small Stone only has two settings, and it sounds like [the band] Big Star or something. The EarthQuaker is more extreme. When you hit the fuzz on it, it kind of spazzes out a little bit, which is ideal. I’m not a fan of subtle effect use.
Kelly: The only effect I used—and that I ever really use in Ty’s band—is an overdrive. It’s a Crowther Hotcake from New Zealand.
Emmett Kelly’s taste for Gibson Les Pauls includes different flavors. He cut the album with a ’59 Special revamped with Duncan Antiquity humbuckers and currently he’s playing a goldtop with P-90s onstage. Photo by Debi Del Grande
Talk about your musical backgrounds.
Kelly: My parents are both drummers, so I grew up surrounded by, like, boogie-bar music, because they were bar-band musicians. When I was young, I listened to classic rock: Cream and stuff like that. Then, I got into Sonic Youth and punk-rock stuff, and that kind of changed things. From there I got into more acoustic music, like medieval folk and Irish music, and when I lived in Chicago I spent a lot of time doing free improvisation.
Everybody in my friend group taught each other what to do. We were figuring music out on our own, which was pretty cool. Charles, who’s the drummer on this record—an old, old friend of mine—we went to high school together, and we would just swap drum moves and teach each other licks. I was a drummer before I was a guitar player.
What impact do you think being a drummer has had on your approach to guitar?
Segall: I think it’s had a strong impact for the rhythm of strumming. I’m not a very crazy lead player. I don’t know many chords or scales, but I do know how to play rhythmically. And it definitely helps with writing, if you understand the counts.
Is your rhythmic approach something that you’ve cultivated or more of a natural ability?
Segall: I don’t think I’ve ever had a natural ability with guitar. It’s always been a battle, but a fun one. On the other hand, I think I’ve always had a natural sense of rhythm. Oftentimes, I’ll play drums first and then record guitar over it. It’ll be like I know the parts of the song based on time structure, and I’ll just make everything else up after that.
full-blown freaks.” —Emmett Kelly
Can you talk a little bit more about your writing process—any other strategies that you might use?
Segall: That’s pretty much it. I’m most insecure about my lyrics, so I can’t sit down and just write lyrics all day. I have a lot of friends that are great lyric writers. They have their journals and they sit down and use them to write some lyrics every day. I could never do that.
As much as you should have your brain turned on to write a song, it’s hard to sit down and try to think about a lyric. It doesn’t work for me. It’s all about not thinking, as weird as that sounds. If there’s a filter there, even if it’s an unintentional one, it doesn’t feel right to me.
What’s it like to be a musician in L.A.?
Kelly: I like the fact that L.A. is a little bit blown-out. It’s weird working in the music business because it’s just an odd profession, and people either thrive in really remote locations or really slammed locations. I don’t thrive in small towns, and as ridiculous as it sounds, Chicago, where I lived until recently, feels like a small town. I wanted to move to a place where no one’s very impressed by anything, so I moved back to L.A. It’s kind of amazing because there’s a youthful scene here—a lot of great rock ’n’ roll. It’s inspiring to be around because people don’t have too many qualms. They just like to have fun.
Ty Segall’s Gear
Guitars1969 Gibson Les Paul
1966 Fender Mustang
Amps
1972 Fender Quad Reverb
Effects
Death By Audio Fuzz War
EarthQuaker Devices Grand Orbiter
Electro-Harmonix Small Stone
Strings and Picks
GHS Boomers (.010–.046)
Dunlop .46 mm picks
Emmett Kelly’s Gear
Guitars1959 Gibson Les Paul Special with Seymour Duncan Antiquities
Gibson Les Paul goldtop with P-90s
Amps
1974 Marshall Artiste 100-watt head
4x12 closed-back slant cab
Effects
Crowther Audio Hotcake overdrive
Strings and Picks
D’Addario NYXL (.010–.046)
Herco Flat/Thumbpicks
What was it like to make your new album?
Segall: It was super fun. I haven’t made a record with a band playing my songs in the studio before. I’ve only made records where I play everything or most instruments, so it was a great experience to just play guitar and let everyone do their thing. It creates such a different feel to have a band
playing on a record. I don’t know why I hadn’t done that sooner.
Were you very specific about what you wanted everyone to play or did you let them come up with their own parts?
Segall: It was pretty much like, “Here’s how the song goes. I’m going to rip this solo. Feel free to
rip yours here. Here’s the jam section, so everyone, let’s just figure this out. Do whatever
you want.” Kind of like: These are the parts, this is what has to happen, and the rest should be free. I would never want to have a drummer that was scared to play how they want to play.
There seems to be a bit of improvisation on the songs—especially on “Break a Guitar.”
Segall: It’s controlled in a certain way, but then there’s a lot of looseness, so that is a huge, crazy jam. Emmett and I are both improvising. We’re basically just playing off each other. I’m not telling him what to do, and I wouldn’t tell him how to solo. You know, he’s insane. He’s such a psycho guitar player. That’s kind of the idea: keep it free and open, but within a structure.
Emmett, what was it like for you?
Kelly: It was fully badass. I love how when the guitar solo is ripping, Ty and I are just, like, full-blown freaks, you know? There was a lot of improvisation going on in general on the record, but Ty is a prolific songwriter and demo-maker,
and so he had the whole album pretty much mapped out. When Ty and I tear into these crazy solo sections, they’re just super bonkers. It’s fun because the spirit of it is really apparent—a positive vibe that you can feel when you listen to the record.
He used to play a Fender Mustang, but in recent years Segall has been cradling a 1969 Gibson Les Paul with a cherry sunburst finish, run into a silverface Fender Quad Reverb.
Photo by Debi Del Grande
What would you attribute that positive vibe to?
Kelly: Just making music together and having a good time. It also doesn’t hurt that the chemistry between everyone in the band is really cool.
Ty, can you talk more specifically about what it’s like to play with Emmett and how your styles mesh?
Segall: Emmett is the most versatile guitar player ever. He can literally play anything. I’m pretty much the one-trick pony, but Emmett is like the secret weapon. He’s a master at playing with you, and I feel like I’m a better guitarist when we're working together.
It’s cool and not competitive at all. It’s almost like we’re trying to push ourselves to get to this other place together. I’ve played with people where you’re both racing each other to the finish line or some shit like that, and that’s totally wack. But it’s super fun to play with Emmett. He’s doing radical shit and he takes you with him.
What was the recording process for the album?
Segall: We recorded it in four-and-a-half days and tracked it mostly live, adding just a little overdubbing—though some of the songs have like five, six vocal tracks on them just because I love putting down as many vocals as possible. Albini will overdub as much you want, but he’s usually pretty great at being like, “You know, I don’t think it needs anything else. I think you guys got it.” Then I’m like, “Well, there’s one little piano thing I was hoping to do,” and he’s like, “Okay.” It’s a nice compromise. I’m not one to go overboard with overdubbing. I’m more of the Albini philosophy of keeping it minimal and tight.
Kelly: The recording process was pretty straightforward in a kind of old-school sense. We went to Chicago with our gear and set it up, and Steve Albini engineered it. He’s amazing. He worked out how to figure out the sound we wanted for the guitars, bass, and drums. We all knew what we wanted to do, and we got it done quickly. We wanted the album to sound very spontaneous, and I think we nailed it.
Ty Segall has recorded eight earlier studio albums, but the new Ty Segall is the first he’s recorded live in the studio with a full band. “I don’t know why I hadn’t done that sooner,” he says. Photo by Debi Del Grande
Was this the first time you’ve worked with Albini?
Segall: Yes. I don’t know why I haven’t worked with him before. It was like taking a master class.
What did you learn working with him?
Kelly: It’s kind of illuminating to work in an environment like Steve’s, because he doesn’t try to get you to sound the way he thinks you should. He just wants to capture the way that you sound. Of course, I’m biased, but it’s a great record and it’s amazing to sit back and listen to how gorgeous all the tones are on it. I’ve recorded in many different settings, but I guess what I take away from this is that the sounds are as important as the songs and the guitar parts.
Segall: There are specific miking things I took away from it, like throwing a nice mini ribbon mic far away from the amp. But besides the technical aspect of how Albini mikes things, I think we’re pretty much on the same level with how we like to make records: The right feel of a take is far greater than playing it perfectly. That’s where the magic is.
YouTube It
In this performance at L.A.s’ Teragram Ballroom, Ty Segall wields his Les Paul Standard at hurricane force starting at 1:20, with a churning, feedback-spiked solo that updates the howling tones of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s live recordings.
Reverend Jetstream 390 Solidbody Electric Guitar - Midnight Black
Reverend Contender 290 Solidbody Electric Guitar - Midnight Black
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.
