The Jazzmaster icon goes beyond offsets and shreds on fresh, sparkly Teles and a Vox-Fender mashup. Plus, he encounters his first Floyd Rose.
Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis is rock ’n’ roll’s loudest low talker. Onstage, the reserved frontman is overshadowed by his three full stacks, summoning up President Teddy Roosevelt’s quote: “speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”
Fellow volume-dealing stalwarts Emmett Jefferson Murphy III (drums)—better known as “Murph”—and Lou Barlow (bass/vocals) helped J form the band in 1984 after their first group, Deep Wound, dissolved. Both left Dinosaur Jr., and then rejoined in 2005. This core group has released eight studio albums of dynamically rich rock that teeters between a runaway locomotive fueled on feedback and buzzing riffs, and hooky, melodic, pop-soaked nimble rhythms that carry more than they crush. While never reaching the mainstream stratosphere like some of their contemporaries (including Nirvana, who opened for Dino Jr. in 1991), this consummate power trio have remained popular in the American underground by continually selling out theaters, splashing into the Billboard 200 (climbing even higher in the Independent and Rock charts), and headlining alternative-music festivals. All along the way, their soft-spoken shredder has ascended as a guitar-hero among musical outcasts.
Before Dinosaur Jr.’s sold-out show at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, Mascis reconnected with PG’s Chris Kies to talk Teles (yes, you read that right; he’s touring with more Telecasters than ever), including the development of his new signature T that’s based on his studio-perfect ’58 model. We also witness two firsts for J: a Phantom-Tele-Jazzmaster Frankenstein and a Floyd Rose-equipped guitar.
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The Phantom of the Bowl
J Mascis has been linked to the Jazzmaster for decades. In 2021, he broke his offset mold, releasing a signature Fender Telecaster based on a beloved 1958 Tele that has long been his go-to instrument for tracking solos. But during our November 2021 chat at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, Mascis mentioned that the ’60s Vox Phantom was his favorite silhouette. He could never get along with them onstage, so he’s cobbled together various parts and made his own dream machine. This guitar features a modern copy of a Phantom body, a Fender Deluxe Series Telecaster maple neck and fretboard (with jumbo frets), and a Mastery JM-style bridge.
The project was entrusted to and executed by Trevor Healy of Healy Guitars out of Easthampton, Massachusetts. Healy recounts: “My favorite thing about it was cutting around the Mastery bridge to fit snug inside the pickguard. There’s also a Seymour Duncan custom shop pickup under the bridge pickup cover, if I’m not mistaken.” Regarding the pickups we can see, Mascis tried several sets—including Fender Eric Johnson signature single-coils (middle and neck) matched with a Seymour Duncan Stra-Bro 90 (bridge)—before landing on a trio of Fender Noiseless single-coils. The guitar rides in open-G tuning and is used on “I Ain’t” from their new album Sweep It Into Space.
All of J’s guitars take Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010–.046) and he shreds with Dunlop Tortex 1.14 mm picks.
Full-On Phantom
Here’s a head-to-toe shot of the marvelous mash-up.
Déjà Blue
“I’ve started seeing it in guitar shops, and it’s weird because it’s like, ‘why is my guitar up on the wall?’,” jokes Mascis. “It’s not a guitar I designed, like with my signature Jazzmasters, so seeing a copy of a guitar I’ve had for decades is weird.” Mascis sort of fell into the Telecaster world by way of Fort Apache Studios owner Joe Harvard, who sold J the 1958 top-loading Tele that his new signature is based on.
Mascis played that ’58 while producing Buffalo Tom’s 1990 album Birdbrain at Fort Apache. Mascis let Harvard know that if he ever wanted to part ways with the Tele, he should call him first. Harvard swore he’d never break ties with the guitar, but only a few months later Mascis got the fateful call. In the Rundown, he mentions that since owning the ’58 it has appeared on almost every solo he’s recorded, because he tends to like what he plays on that Tele more than anything else he owns.
In our November 2021 cover story, J elaborated on what makes the blue-sparkle T so special: “On that Tele, I find my solos are more interesting. If I play the same solo on a Strat, it just sounds like a Strat to me. It’s slightly more boring somehow? I don’t know where my brain or fingers go or why that happens, but I usually find that if I play solos on different guitars for the same song, the stuff I play on that Tele is always more interesting. The top-loader was the first Tele I really bonded with, and it was about the feel. When I pick up Teles with string-through-body bridges, the strings are a little harder to bend. People say the top-loaders don’t have as much sustain, but I never thought of a Tele as a sustain guitar anyway, and when you hit a Big Muff, every guitar has sustain. So that argument doesn't really work for me.”
Notable ingredients for the production model include an alder body covered with a dashing bottle-rocket blue-flake finish (offset with a mirrored pickguard), a custom J Mascis C-profile maple neck that’s paired with a maple fretboard pocketing 21 jumbo frets, and J Mascis Custom ’58 Tele Single-Coil pickups. However, in the signature guitar he showed us, he swapped out the stock Fender pickups for a Seymour Duncan BG1400 Lead Stack Telecaster (bridge) and McNelly A2 or A5 T-style (neck). (The neck and hardware feature Fender’s “road-worn” treatment, too.) So far, he’s been using it on “Feel the Pain” and “Start Choppin’.”
Sparkle Spank
Prior to getting his signature Tele, this Fender Custom Shop Deluxe Telecaster Thinline was his favorite live T. The purple-sparkle axe features many of J’s go-to specs, like jumbo frets on a worn-down, C-profile maple neck and a top-loader bridge. (Although Fender delivered the guitar with a string-through setup, forgetting his request for a top-loading bridge, J quickly swapped one onto it.) As of filming, it had a Seymour Duncan BG1400 Lead Stack Telecaster (bridge) and TV Jones Starwood (neck).
JM Thinline for J
To match his Custom Shop Tele Thinline, Mascis requested a Jazzmaster Thinline semi-hollow in the hopes it’d be a lightweight option for extended practice jams, but the finished product came out heavier than J imagined. The Custom Shop JM-style pickups were spray painted by his tech.
A St. Vincent Jazzmaster?
While recording Sweep It Into Space, J experimented with different sounds and tunings. One pairing that yielded a raucous result was using an Ernie Ball Music Man St. Vincent guitar in C#-tuning, which delivered the gnarly “I Met the Stones.” The foundation of the beefy track is the St. Vincent’s DiMarzio mini humbuckers into a Fender tweed. J shared this with PG in November 2021: “It [EBMM St. Vincent] seemed to play in tune well at that pitch. A lot of those rhythm parts are on that guitar through a tweed Fender Bandmaster. I think the sound on that song is mostly from the amp and the mini-humbuckers in that guitar.” So, his road-take on that instrument is a Jazzmaster with the neck pickup disconnected, blasting through the same DiMarzio bridge mini-humbucker that’s in the St. Vincent.
Tuxedo Tele
“I asked Fender if they had any guitars that would stay in tune in C#, and they sent this to me,” says Mascis. The Fender American Ultra Luxe Telecaster Floyd Rose HH is J’s first 6-string with a Floyd Rose trem and, noted in the Rundown, he eyed “Mountain Man” (from 1985’s Dinosaur) for its maiden voyage.
The snazzy Telecaster is constructed with an alder body, Fender’s augmented-D-shaped maple neck, a maple fretboard and 22 jumbo frets, Ultra Double Tap humbuckers (splitable via Fender’s S-1 switch), and a Floyd Rose Original Double-Locking 2-Point Tremolo bridge.
J For Jazzmaster
We’d be remised if we didn’t feature J’s longtime live No. 1—a sunburst ’63 Fender Jazzmaster with its original neck and pickups. He replaced the pickup covers and knobs, put in jumbo frets, subbed in a Tune-o-matic-style bridge, and since our 2017 episode, he upgraded the stock Fender vibrato to a Mastery.
Tone … Deaf
Anyone who has witnessed Dinosaur Jr. live recognizes these towers of tone. For years, Mascis has been flanked by the same three stacks and sidestage combo. Here we see three-fourths of J’s jumbo setup: two late-’60s Marshall Super Bass full-stacks and a vintage Hiwatt DR-103 head driving two Marshall 4x12s.
Close Ups
Vintage Hiwatt DR-103
1960s Marshall Super Bass
Another 1960s Marshall Super Bass
Fender Makes Four
In the 2012 episode, Mascis was using a Victoria 80212 tweed Twin clone, but in 2017, and again in late 2021, he was using the same vintage Fender Twin Reverb.
More For Mascis
For at least 10-plus years, J Mascis has used a Bob Bradshaw-built Custom Audio Electronics switcher as his mission control. The standout stomps that were seen in the 2012 and 2017 editions include a Tone Bender MkI/Rangemaster-clone combo pedal made by Built to Spill’s Jim Roth (bottom right corner—in a third new enclosure since the 2012 and 2017 videos, each showing a different box), Mascis’ first Electro-Harmonix “Ram’s Head” Big Muff (top right), a vintage EHX Electric Mistress, an MC-FX clone of a Univox Super-Fuzz (lower right, blue box), a pair of ZVEX pedals—a Double Rock (two Box of Rock stomps in one) and a Lo-Fi Loop Junky (both bottom left), a Tube Works Real Tube Overdrive, a Moog MF Delay, and a Boss TU-3S Tuner. The new pedals not featured in the last two videos are a Homebrew Electronics Germania 44 treble booster (lower right), a JAM Pedals RetroVibe MkII, an Xotic SL Drive, a Suhr Jack Rabbit tremolo, a Dr. Scientist Frazz Dazzler fuzz, an EHX Oceans 11, and a (Dunlop) Jimi Hendrix ’69 Psych Series Uni-Vibe chorus/vibrato. Everything receives juice from either an MXR MC403 Power System or an MXR M237 DC Brick.
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- Electro-Harmonix J Mascis Ram's Head Big Muff Pi Pedal - Premier Guitar ›
- Electro-Harmonix J Mascis Ram's Head Big Muff Pi Pedal - Premier Guitar ›
The idiosyncratic, Summer of Love-era Musicraft Messenger had a short-lived run and some unusual appointments, but still has some appreciators out there.
Funky, mysterious, and rare as hen’s teeth, the Musicraft Messenger is a far-out vintage guitar that emerged in the Summer of Love and, like so many heady ideas at the time, didn’t last too much longer.
The brainchild of Bert Casey and Arnold Curtis, Musicraft was a short-lived endeavor, beginning in San Francisco in 1967 and ending soon thereafter in Astoria, Oregon. Plans to expand their manufacturing in the new locale seemed to have fizzled out almost as soon as they started.
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.Single-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.”
Pearl Jam announces U.S. tour dates for April and May 2025 in support of their album Dark Matter.
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.
The legendary German hard-rock guitarist deconstructs his expressive playing approach and recounts critical moments from his historic career.
This episode has three main ingredients: Shifty, Schenker, and shredding. What more do you need?
Chris Shiflett sits down with Michael Schenker, the German rock-guitar icon who helped launch his older brother Rudolf Schenker’s now-legendary band, Scorpions. Schenker was just 11 when he played his first gig with the band, and recorded on their debut LP, Lonesome Crow, when he was 16. He’s been playing a Gibson Flying V since those early days, so its only natural that both he and Shifty bust out the Vs for this occasion.
While gigging with Scorpions in Germany, Schenker met and was poached by British rockers UFO, with whom he recorded five studio records and one live release. (Schenker’s new record, released on September 20, celebrates this pivotal era with reworkings of the material from these albums with a cavalcade of high-profile guests like Axl Rose, Slash, Dee Snider, Adrian Vandenberg, and more.) On 1978’s Obsession, his last studio full-length with the band, Schenker cut the solo on “Only You Can Rock Me,” which Shifty thinks carries some of the greatest rock guitar tone of all time. Schenker details his approach to his other solos, but note-for-note recall isn’t always in the cards—he plays from a place of deep expression, which he says makes it difficult to replicate his leads.
Tune in to learn how the Flying V impacted Schenker’s vibrato, the German parallel to Page, Beck, and Clapton, and the twists and turns of his career from Scorpions, UFO, and MSG to brushes with the Rolling Stones.
Credits
Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editor: Addison Sauvan
Graphic Design: Megan Pralle
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.