Area prewired pickguard, front and back. Photo: Guitar Center
Area setup
This is a hum canceling, vintage-style setup that will take you from Nashville to Texas, with an Area 58 in the neck, Area 67 in the middle and an Area 61 in the bridge. The pickups respond like great vintage single-coils: played hard, they sound louder and tougher than you'd expect from ordinary pickups, but they clean up immediately by picking softer or rolling down the volume control. These pickups deliver the sparkle and edge missing from other hum canceling pickups.
Vintage setup
Loaded with True Velvet bridge, middle and neck pickups, it sounds clean, bright and especially sweet above the 12th fret. DiMarzio accomplishes this by tuning the coil to a frequency range that is bright but not thin and by using a new magnet stagger specifically designed to enhance string balance, producing great clarity even with full chords. The middle pickup has reverse polarity for hum canceling in the 2 and 4 positions on the selector switch. The bridge pickup is just a touch warmer and loudelouder, so the transition between pickup positions is smooth and balanced. In true vintage style, the True Velvet pickups have hand-ground magnets and vintage cloth-covered wire.
High Power setup
This pickguard comes with a ProTrack in the neck position, a Fast Track 1 in the middle and a Fast Track 2 in the bridge for tons of power and punch.
HS (formerly YJM) setup
This is the most popular hum-cancelling set for classical metal players. The pickguard has an HS-4 (formerly YJM) in the neck and middle positions and an HS-3 in the bridge position.
Billy Corgan setup
As a result of working with Billy Corgan on his custom Strat, DiMarzio modified the Air Norton S (neck) and the Tone Zone S (bridge). Billy asked for a deeper sound from the low strings without losing punch and a cleaner sound with high-gain amps. They lowered the frequency response of one coil in each pickup to boost the bass while opening up the mids. The end result is the new BC-1 and BC- 2 which come pre-wired along with a Chopper in the middle on this Billy Corgan pickguard.
The company has also released details on upcoming solderless replacement pickup sets for Tele, Les Paul, J-Bass and P-Bass.
Tele-style
The Tele replacement set includes chrome Tele control plate, knobs, chrome and black pickups, wiring harness with solderless installation and two options: Vintage Set (Twang King neck & bridge) and Area Set (Area T neck & bridge).
Les Paul-style
Replacement Les Paul sets will be available for both long shaft & short shaft pots. Both will offer the same three choices: Vintage Set (PAF 36th Anniversary & PAF 36th Anniversary Bridge F-spaced), Classic Rock Set (PAF 36th Anniversary & Super Distortion F-spaced), and Modern Metal Set (D Activator Neck & D Activator Bridge F-spaced).
P- and J-Bass-style
The P-Bass replacement pickguard will includes white-black-white laminated pickguard, black pickups and knobs. It will be available with DiMarzio Model P or Split P.
The J-Bass replacement set includes a chrome control plate, black pickups and knobs. It will be available with DiMarzio Model J set or Area J set.
For more information:
DiMarzio
Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if you’re not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an “intelligent pitch-changer” that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ’80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. It’s essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is ±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and it’s also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the device’s guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days it’s not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000’s capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymon’s “shimmer” effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what you’ve won!)
“If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.”
But there’s another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. It’s easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which they’re mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isn’t always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offer—and I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, that’s a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions don’t quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) It’s all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists won’t be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations exist—Eventide’s own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhere—and you’ve got the time—fire it up, wait for the distinctive “click” of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
