If you whip out these licks at the ol’ Tuesday night blues jam, they’ll probably move it to Wednesday and not tell you.
Pardon me while I beat this dead horse: Guitarists are often hobbled by muscle-memory patterns. At times our musical choices aren’t choices at all—they’re just our hands operating on auto-pilot.
Sometimes smashing the muscle-memory box means exploring unfamiliar notes and scales. But it can also be about playing the same old notes and scales using new melodic patterns and note combinations. That’s our mission this month. We’re going to mutate familiar blues scale patterns into unrecognizable shapes via angular melodic choices and jagged dissonance. This isn’t about playing blues—it’s about wringing new ideas out of old ones.
Compare Ex. 1 and Ex. 2. The first example consists of a few numbingly conventional licks. The second one is a noisy racket, full of near-painful dissonance. But what do the two examples have in common?
The two attitudes are galaxies apart. Still, the rhythms are identical on both clips. And believe it or not, so are the notes. Granted, those notes don’t appear in the same order. But both examples borrow from the same pool of pitches.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Now, I’m not saying that Ex. 2 is “better” than Ex. 1, or that guitarists who play licks like Ex. 1 suck. Nor am I suggesting that Ex. 2 is well-suited to blues music. If you whip out these licks at the ol’ Tuesday night blues jam, they’ll probably move it to Wednesday and not tell you. This is simply about stretching your vocabulary by stretching your fingers.
Here’s one of those stretches, and a challenging one at that. Chances are the scale in Ex. 3 feels very familiar. It’s the old blues-box pattern many of us learned soon after we started on guitar.
Click here for Ex. 3
But what if, instead of playing the scale straight up and down, we juggle the note order a bit? Try Ex. 4.
Click here for Ex. 4
Ex. 4 is way harder to play. It sounds weird because we so rarely hear the scale in that configuration. Here the melodic intervals are mostly fourths (except for the major third between C and E). That means playing many consecutive notes on the same fret, but on different strings, using the same finger. It’s even tougher when you play the scale legato, with minimum possible gap between notes. (This problem is unique to guitar and bass. For most instruments, playing fourths is no more difficult than playing thirds.)
Venturing Fourth
My long-ago guitar teacher, Ted Greene, taught me to play ascending fourths by fretting the lower note with a fingertip, like you normally would. But instead of lifting the finger to play the note on the adjacent string, you flatten the finger, bending your first knuckle slightly and pressing the note with the flesh between fingertip and first knuckle (Photo 1). It helps to be a bit double-jointed.
Photo 1
Anyway, Ex. 4 is a bitch. But practicing it for a few hours will disrupt your muscle-memory habits and lead you to new melodic ideas.
Seventh Heaven—or Hell?
Minor sevenths are more dissonant—and less common melodically. But playing them is a lot like playing fourths, except that the notes don’t fall on adjacent strings. In Ex. 5, all the intervals are minor sevenths, except for the major sixths between C and A. Try the same finger-flattening technique as in Ex. 4. You’ll just be fretting the higher note closer to the finger’s first knuckle.
Click here for Ex. 5
Complications Ensue
The term “blues scale” means different things to different people. For some it’s the pattern in Ex. 3. Others would insist that this should be called a minor pentatonic scale, and that it’s only a blues scale if you add the b5, as in Ex. 6.
Click here for Ex. 6
I say, blues scale, schmooze scale. Great blues players might use every note in the chromatic scale. If you combine the notes in Ex. 6 with the arpeggios of the major I, IV, and V chords, that’s 11 of the 12 notes in the chromatic scale—everything but the b2. Which you can also use, as discussed in a recent column. Plus, there are all the pitches that fall between scale steps when you bend strings or play with a slide.
But for now, let’s hear what happens when we apply those uncomfortable intervals to the scale in Ex. 6. Ex. 7 uses the same notes, but with the skip-a-string approach of Ex. 5. With the b5 mixed in, things get real dissonant, real fast.
Click here for Ex. 7
The added b5 introduces major seventh intervals alongside the major sixths and minor sevenths. It gets even crunchier when you play the same notes as harmonic intervals (Ex. 8).
Click here for Ex. 8
Now let’s return to where we started. Here’s Ex 1 again, now with notation and tab. As you can see, it’s a mix of blues-box notes and major-key chord tones.
Click here for Ex. 1
Again, Ex. 2 employs the same rhythms and palette of notes as Ex. 1, but with provocative harmonies and jagged melodies. If there really were such a thing as a bruise scale, this might be it.
Click here for Ex. 2
The moral: Sometimes the difference between playing inside and playing outside is simply a matter of approaching familiar material from an unfamiliar angle.
While the pedal builders at Sehat Effectors are in the game for their love of the 6-string, they’ve since begun exploring what effects pedals mean to other kinds of instrumentalists.
This time, I’d like to share my perspective as a pedal builder on how our effects pedals—originally crafted with guitarists in mind—are experiencing an exciting evolution in use. Our customer base spans around the globe, and as it turns out, many of them aren’t guitarists. Instead, our pedals are finding their way into the hands of non-guitarist musicians like DJs, synth players, movie sound directors, and even drummers. Yes, a drummer once used one of my fuzz pedals in a drum miking setup—quite an extreme yet bold experiment! This made me wonder: How did such a phenomenon come about?
Most of the pedals I build are fuzz effects and other experimental types, all primarily tested within guitar setups. But then I visited a friend’s studio; he goes by “Balance” onstage. He’s a well-known musician and producer here in Indonesia, and a member of the hip-hop group JHF (Jogja Hip Hop Foundation). Now, here’s the kicker—Balance doesn’t play guitar! Yet, he’s one of my customers, having asked for a fuzz and modulation pedal for his modular synthesizer rig. Initially, I was skeptical when he mentioned his plans. Neither my team nor I are familiar with synthesizers, let alone Eurorack or modular formats. I know guitars and, at best, bass guitar. My colleague has dabbled with effects experimentation, but only within the guitar framework.
So, my visit to his studio was a chance to study and research how guitar effects pedals could be adapted to a fundamentally different instrument ecosystem. The following is an interview I did with Balance to get a deeper understanding of his perspective.
As a modular synthesizer user, aren’t all kinds of sounds already achievable with a synth? Why mix one with guitar effects?
Balance: Some unique sounds, like those from Hologram Effects’ Microcosm or the eccentric pedals from Sehat Effectors, are hard to replicate with just a synth. Also, for sound design, I find it more intuitive to tweak knobs in real-time than rely on a computer—direct knob control feels more human for me.
Are there challenges in integrating guitar pedals with a modular synthesizer setup? After all, their ecosystems are quite different.
Balance: There are indeed significant differences, like jack types, power supplies, and physical format. Modular synthesizers are designed to sit on a table or stand, while guitar pedals are meant for the floor and foot control. However, they share a common thread in the goal of manipulating signals, eventually amplified through a mixing board and amplifier. The workaround is using converters/adapters to bridge the connection.“If you’re a saxophonist who buys a guitar pedal, it’s yours to use however you like.”
Are you the only modular synth user combining them with guitar pedals?
Balance: Actually, I got the idea after seeing other musicians experiment this way. Effects like fuzz or distortion are iconic to guitar but absent in synthesizer sound options. I believe signal manipulation with fuzz or distortion is a universal idea that appeals to musicians creating music, regardless of their instrument.
This brief chat gave me new insight and sparked my curiosity about different frameworks in music-making. While I’m not yet tempted to dive into modular synths myself, I now have a clearer picture of how fuzz and distortion transcend guitar. Imagine a saxophonist at a live show using a pedalboard with a DigiTech Whammy and Boss Metal Zone—absurd, maybe, but why not? If you’re a saxophonist who buys a guitar pedal, it’s yours to use however you like. Because, in the end, all musicians create music based on their inner concerns—whether it’s about romance, friendship, political situations, war, or anger. Eventually, they will explore how best to express those concerns from many angles, and of course, “sound” and “tone” are fundamental aspects of the music itself. Good thing my partner and I named our company Sehat Effectors and not Sehat Guitar Works. Haha!
Reverend Jetstream 390 Solidbody Electric Guitar - Midnight Black
Jetstream 390 Midnight BlackReverend Contender 290 Solidbody Electric Guitar - Midnight Black
Contender 290, Midnight BlackSingle-coils and humbuckers aren’t the only game in town anymore. From hybrid to hexaphonic, Joe Naylor, Pete Roe, and Chris Mills are thinking outside the bobbin to bring guitarists new sonic possibilities.
Electric guitar pickups weren’t necessarily supposed to turn out the way they did. We know the dominant models of single-coils and humbuckers—from P-90s to PAFs—as the natural and correct forms of the technology. But the history of the 6-string pickup tells a different story. They were mostly experiments gone right, executed with whatever materials were cheapest and closest at hand. Wartime embargos had as much influence on the development of the electric guitar pickup as did any ideas of function, tone, or sonic quality—maybe more so.
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.”
Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small has been a lifetime devotee and thrash-metal expert, so we invited him to help us break down what makes Slayer so great.
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.