“I definitely lean toward extravagant, psychedelic guitar playing,” says Ty Segall. “I like weirdos.” Photo by Denée Petracek.
Ty Segall isn’t your typical guitar geek. “I was the kid who learned by listening to Black Flag, playing two-finger power chords,” he concedes somewhat sheepishly with an undeniably Californian twang. But get on the subject of 1960s psychedelic space rock or percussive acoustic guitar craft, and Segall is ready to take you to school.
Since 2008, Segall has been channeling his inner Zappa, pumping out records by the fistful and embracing a singularly eclectic style. Segall’s latest, Manipulator (Drag City), is a heady brew that mashes sunbaked psychedelic melodic strains with Blue Cheer-meets-Blue Öyster Cult riffs and the acoustic jangle of Zeppelin and Sabbath.
A preposterously prodigious songwriter, Segall is no slacker when it comes to playing, having tracked nearly all the instruments and vocals on Manipulator. From janky-sounding acoustic tracks to trashy, thrashy lead parts, Segall sounds completely at ease with a guitar in his hands, no matter which other hats he might be wearing.
How did this batch of songs come together?
The songs on the record come from 14 months of writing. I spent the whole year writing at my house, two-to-seven days a week, depending on what was going on. The ones that made the record are just the best of the bunch.
Do you have a songwriting regimen?
It takes a lot of work to get to the point where you’re not working too hard for it. It takes a lot of discipline—doing things every day just to do them. If you get one good song per week, you’re really lucky. But you can work for a month or two without getting a single good song.
How do you keep track of your song ideas?
I record ideas. There are lots and lots of songs I’ve thrown away through the years: Multiply my discography by three, and you get an idea of all the songs I’ve thrown away!
Do you know immediately if something isn’t working, or do you get outside opinions on that?
There have been a couple times when I’ve written something I thought was garbage, but other people felt I should put on a record. Most of the time, I just know. If it feels like a put-on, pushing an emotion, or relying on a gimmick or a specific sound, that’s not right.
What are your attitudes about collaboration in your songwriting?
I love collaborating. My favorite kind is the rapid-fire, open-minded freestyle where it’s as if you’re passing a ball back and forth. It’s a very good way to refresh your own mind in songwriting.
Ty Segall’s live band for the Manipulator tour includes Charles Mootheart on guitar and Emily Rose Epstein on drums. Mikal Cronin handles bass (not pictured), but pictured here on bass is Denée Petracek. “Everybody in the band rips, so to take the songs into a less-controlled place
is pretty amazing,” Segall says.
When you’re writing, how do you record those ideas?
I have a Tascam 388 8-track at my house, and I just demo songs out like they would be for a record. It’s not just to write it, it’s testing a song’s ability to be on a record. If it doesn’t work, I might try another version. For some songs on Manipulator, there were three or four versions of a demo.
Do you think in terms of songs or in terms of albums?
You have to start by thinking in terms of songs. If you think purely in terms of an album, the songs just aren’t going to hold up. I’m an “album guy,” so I like to try to have both in mind.
Do you think of Manipulator as having a unifying thematic or sonic thread running through it?
Yeah, thematically, all those songs rest in the same place—lyrically, they’re in the same world. They’re like characters that interact with each other, and there’s a loose story being told.
Two of my favorite albums are Electric Ladyland [Jimi Hendrix Experience] and The Beatles [aka “the White Album”]. Those are both double records but each of them is very varied—they don’t have a unifying sonic element, and that’s what makes them unified. It was a similar idea with Manipulator.
Ty Segall plays his No. 1 preferred model, a Fender Mustang. He’s recently taken a Les Paul on the road as a workhorse. Photo by Jackie Roman.
Do you write on guitar, or come up with drum patterns first, or all of the above?
All of the above. I find it helps to mix up how you start a song, and where the idea comes from. That’s crucial to keep something new sounding. If a song is written on drums first, with a melody in your head, it’s going to be a way different song than if it were written on guitar.
When do lyrics come into play?
I usually do lyrics at the same time when I’m writing on guitar. But with drums, it’s completely after-the-fact, freestyle.
What about stages of tracking? What goes down first?
On the demos, I might track guitar first, but when it came time to do the record, I always would track the drums first, to make sure they sound perfect. Then I would do bass, guitar, keyboards, and always vocals last.
Do you write down an arrangement or is it in your head?
I’ll just make notes as we go along. Like, “Needs noise blast at 0:32.”
Who are some of your guitar heroes?
For acoustic, I’m a huge John Fahey fan, because he’s weird—he’s bizarro. He’s super emotive, but also rhythmic. It’s especially important to be rhythmic when it comes to acoustic playing—the percussive clashing of the pick on the strings is one of my favorite things. You can get that with fingerpicking, too. I love when someone smacks an acoustic with their palm—it’s great!
I also love the old blues guys, and so many great electric players are also great acoustic players—Hendrix, Jimmy Page, all those guys.
When it comes to lead guitar players, who gets you most amped?
Oh, man … Tony McPhee of the Groundhogs, for one. Along with the guys in Pink Fairies and the guitarist for Hawkwind—he was part of the crew of early-’70s English, post-psychedelic, hard-rock guys. He played with a lot of blues guys and started going into a lot of weirder hard-rock stuff. I love him.
Peter Green is super cool, [Frank] Zappa is crazy—Hot Rats is so fun to listen to. And then there are the classics: Tony Iommi … Jimmy Page is so rad. It’s cliché to talk about him, but there’s a reason why: He’s so great! He’s so interesting—that’s what it is about him. I also like Bob 1 [Mothersbaugh] from Devo, who’s super weird and cool.
Ty Segall's Gear
Guitars
1966 Fender Mustang
1977 Gibson ES-335
1970 Gibson Les Paul
1970s Italian-made acoustic 12-string
Stella acoustic guitar
Amps
1972 Fender Quad Reverb
Music Man HD-130
Effects
Death By Audio Fuzz War
Strings and Picks
D’Addario EXL115 (.011–.049)
Bass Gear
1968 Gibson EB-0 with flatwounds
1970s Ampeg B-15
I really like lead guitarists who don’t need to play in your face, they just add a really nice accompaniment to things. There’s also Randy Holden, who was the second guitar player in Blue Cheer. He’s on the third Blue Cheer record [New! Improved! Blue Cheer]. He’s only on the B-side, because they kicked him out—he was too good! [Laughs.] He was pretty rad. And then he put out a solo record, Population II, that’s absolutely insane, with the coolest leads ever. I definitely lean toward extravagant, psychedelic guitar playing. Steve Morgen is another. I like weirdos.
What are your go-to guitars?
My main squeeze for a long time was a ’66 Fender Mustang that I toured with and recorded with for years. But the idea with this record was to mix it up. So I got a ’77 Gibson ES-335, which is what I used on a lot of the rhythm tracks for Manipulator. A lot of the leads are the Mustang. I have just one amp I like to record with—a ’72 Fender Quad Reverb. It’s like a double Twin with four 12" speakers.
Wow, that must be pretty heavy.
Yeah, but it breaks up in the best way ... it sounds like Dick Dale on steroids.
Those kinds of amps are popular among players who want clean sounds. You can get it to break up without going deaf?
Well, I definitely play way too loud! [Laughs.] But it has gain and master volume knobs, so you can kind of control things.
What about effects?
I have a Death By Audio Fuzz War pedal, which is pretty much the only pedal I like using these days.
Do you have a string preference?
I like to play .011 sets. Ernie Balls are rad, but I’ve been switching around a bit. I played Ernie Balls for a really long time, then I switched to D’Addarios, which I’m trying out right now.
What are you looking for in a string set?
I just want the toughest strings out there that aren’t going to break. I break strings every other show if I don’t change them. It’s super annoying. One issue is that Fender Mustang bridge….
Do you use the tremolo on the Mustang?
So much—it’s kind of stupid how much I use it.
Aside from their floating tremolo bridges, Mustangs are quirky when it comes to the pickup phase switches.
When I want to play the Mustang, I just set it with the bridge pickup on “rhythm,” because it has so much treble to begin with. And then on my amp, I’ll turn every tone knob up to 10.
Segall plays his 1970 Les Paul on August 16, 2014, at the Ceremonia festival in Toluca, Mexico. He got the guitar at a bargain price because of its repaired headstock. Photo by Tony Franćois.
Is there any other guitar gear that’s getting you excited these days?
I didn’t want to bring my hollowbody on tour, so I got a 1970 Gibson Les Paul for the road. It had a broken headstock, but that was fixed around 1975 and has been fine ever since. That’s cool, because that made it cost about $2,000 less than it should have!
What about the acoustic guitar on Manipulator?
A lot of it is 12-string. I have an old Italian 12-string from the ’70s. Live, it sounds dead—it’s backwards and wrong. But it records perfectly. It sounds like cardboard, which is great. You turn up the mic and there are no weird low-mid frequencies, which can sometimes be a problem. I also have a really nice Gibson 12-string acoustic. But recorded, it sounds like shit. I also have a Stella acoustic guitar that sounds really bad live. But recorded, it sounds great. Those are the two acoustic guitars on the record.
What’s going on in the bass department?
I have a ’68 Gibson EB-0 bass. With its short scale, that one is super fun to play. The action on this one is super low, so I can do crazy stuff on it.
What about bass strings?
I’m a fan of flatwound strings.
How do you amplify your bass?
I usually play it through my Fender Quad—I don’t have a designated bass amp. But for this album, I borrowed my buddy’s ’70s Ampeg B-15.
The bass tone on “Feel” is especially gnarly. What went into that?
Ah, there’s a secret on that one! We sped up the tape machine, and I played guitar as the bass line. We then put it back to normal speed so it was an octave lower. Then it was mixed with an actual bass track, which gave it a particular sound.
You get a sick, crunchy rhythm guitar tone on songs like “The Faker” and “Susie Thumb.” Is that your Gibson ES-335 in action?
Yes, often through the Fuzz War pedal.
What’s your approach to using fuzz pedals on rhythm guitar tracks?
The way I see it, all that breakup and noise works like cool blemishes on the record. Put very simply, I’ll think: The verse is clean, the chorus is fuzzy. Rhythm and lead guitar parts often work the same way.
And your strategy in terms of creating memorable guitar solos?
I view myself as playing two different types of guitar solos: the melodic hook solo, and the noisy weirdo solo. It’s all about having perspective and being appropriate. But all of that stuff is like taking a ball of paint and throwing it against the wall.
That probably doesn’t work every time.
Oh, not at all. But you work through it and you reach another place where you “get it.”
What about playing live?
It’s different live, because the songs change and become entirely different beasts. It’s all part of a song becoming “finished.”
YouTube It
Ty Segall and his band slay it on Conan, performing “Feel” off his new album, Manipulator. Forward to 1:50 for a freak-out solo!
Who’s in your live band?
Charles Mootheart is the other guitar player in the band. He’s a madman—a far better guitar player than I am. He’s the guitar player in my other band, Fuzz, where he’s the main riffmaster. He used to play Fender Mustangs and now he plays a custom guitar. He uses a Fuzz War, as well, and he plays through a Music Man 4x10 amp, and a Fender Twin head through a 4x12 cabinet.
Live, I play my Fender Quad Reverb and a Music Man head through a 4x12 cabinet. We both play through two amps.
On bass, you have Mikal Cronin. What gear does he use?
He plays a Rickenbacker through a giant [Ampeg] 8x10 cabinet.
Given that you tracked most of the parts on Manipulator, how do these other players get you psyched?
That’s the coolest part of it all: We’re all learning it together as a band. And as a band, I think we’re generally louder, faster, and a bit more aggressive. That’s exciting to me, especially when tackling songs that were written in a more controlled environment. Everybody in the band rips, so to take the songs into a less-controlled place is pretty amazing.
How involved are you in steering the overall sound of the ensemble onstage?
The way I see it, my role is in setting the tempo and the chord changes. That’s it. With a band, some things will take on a different vocal harmony, vibe, etc.
Aside from the band, what have you heard this year that gets you excited to play?
I’ve always been a total record junkie-nerd-weirdo, rummaging through records for new discoveries. Lately, I’ve been overloaded with stuff, such that I’m continuously buying records.
Also I’m really fortunate to know a lot of great players—Mikal has some solo records that are insane and great, along with the band White Fence, which I just worked with. The cool thing is that everybody’s pushing each other all the time, but there’s no negativity and harshness—it’s positive and helpful. It’s like a friendly competition, which is cool.
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.
