Seymour Duncan
First off, I’d like to get a bit of history, both about you and the company. How did you get started?
S.D: Well, as a player I started at about fourteen years old and started touring all over the place – I knew a guitar player called Roy Buchannan who was very important to me and I started playing here and there and ended up being the guy that was repairing everybody’s guitars. I was real hands-on and was into amateur ham radio so I got into repairing and building things. It was quite easy for me, as working on guitars then was quite simple.
I started fixing things for different people, I wound pickups for Hendrix back in the mid 1960’s, for Roger Mayer too. I was working with Joe Walsh of the James Gang, doing stuff for him and started travelling, working with lots of other people. In the early 1970’s, I went to England and began working for the Fender Soundhouse.
I was trying to design stuff for Fender, but they weren’t very interested in a lot of the parts I was using – I wanted to do the five-way switch, which they didn’t really wanna change on the Stratocaster. I wanted to make hot pickups which they weren’t really too concerned about, I wanted to do R-W-R-P for the centre pickup of a Strat so you could get the humbucking effect in the 2 and 4 positions, (a method of winding the centre pickups in the opposite direction that creates natural hum-cancellation when two pickups are selected) they weren’t really interested in that either, so I decided that I was gonna start doing that myself.
I started doing OEMs (original equipment manufacturing) for several guitar companies and then actually manufacturing my own pickups for sale and taking them around. I started making brass bridges for Telecasters and doing the phenolic pickguards for Telecasters and Esquires. I was also modifying 5-way switches – converting 3-way to 5-way and started doing more and more rewindings. I started advertising in 1977/78 to do rewinds and by the end of 1978 I started manufacturing the humbucking pickup and went towards having an injection mould made which at the time was pretty expensive. So that’s basically how I got started.
Working over here in England was also a big thing for me – I was working for The Rolling Stones, The Who – a lot of bands that were very popular. Free was a very important band to me over here too.
I came over to England with Roy Buchannan in the middle of 1973 where I started working and recording at Polydor records with an artist by the name of Chris Harlow, whose stage name was Chris Rainbow and we had a bunch of records out. I’d work at Polydor at night and at The Fender Soundhouse during the day. Then, when I went back to the States due to Visa problems I went to California and started the Seymour Duncan Company.
Did you have any specific artists in the US that were attached to your sound and became synonymous with the brand?
Yeah – I was working with Jackson Browne, Gerry Magee with the Ventures, Roy
Buchannan and mainly Jeff Beck. I wound my original JB pickups for him in 1973/74 and he used the guitar on the Blow by Blow album. People starting hearing his guitar tone and he started mentioning in articles the guitar that I built for him, publicising my prototype JB and the prototype jazz model, the JM.
When did you begin making pickups for the bass?
Probably from the beginning – in 1978 I was fabricating Jazz and P-bass pickups, so I’ve always done a lot of bass pickups. Early on, we were doing a lot more with the electric guitar pickups and didn’t really focus a whole lot on the bass pickups. Later on in the manufacturing process, we started doing the ‘Basslines’ range and we really made an effort to give some focus to the type of pickup made solely for the bass player.
Are there specific bass players that you could relate to as championing the Seymour Duncan sound?
S.D: One of the main guys I was doing rewinds for was a guy called… Jaco. I played with Jaco about three times, we always talked about different types of sounds and I always showed him the newest pickups that I had made – I often sent him down some to try out on his Jazz basses. Although he was such a big hero to bass players all over the world, there have been so many different bass players that I’ve worked with throughout the years..
E.S: Steve Bailey, the fretless bass player, was really helpful in designing electronics specifically for the fretless bassist. Also, Mark Hoppus, the bass player from Blink 182, who really turned one of our bass Pickups, the SPB-3, better known as the ‘Quarter-Pounder for P-Bass’ into the punk and heavy rock pickup. It’s actually our most popular pickup for bass right now and I believe Mark was really important for us in achieving that.
S.D: We were doing Greg Chaisson from Badlands too – we were advertising with him back in the early days.
E.S: Also, there was another bass player that was very important to us, known more in LA bass circles and his name was John Peña through working with him and Alphonso Johnson, we were able to develop our range of active bass pickups.
In the age-old battle of active vs. passive, what do you see as the pros and cons of using each?
S.D: Well, the passive pickup has always been the traditional mainstay in what people have heard, ever since bassists like Carol Kaye. A lot of people find that with active pickups you can have problems when you’re out on the gig and your battery goes dead, or you realise that your tone changes as the current from the battery drains, which can be quite problematic. With passive pickups, your sound is right there – no mess, no fuss – you just get up and do it, you know?
E.S: That said, active pickups are more popular among bass players than guitar players, so we’ve developed a full range of pickups, both in the soapbar format and in the Jazz and ‘P’ format. In addition, we find that especially in eq, with active pickups you have far more tonal possibilities at your fingertips, rather than just a passive treble roll-off, so we offer tone circuits that give either two or three bands of focused eq to the bass player, regardless of whether they’re using them with active or passive pickups. In other words, you can have passive pickups – let’s say the stock pickups that came in your Jazz bass, but use our tone circuits to replace the passive electronics and give you all the advantages of active eq, plus we’ve built in a separate eq contour made specifically for slap style playing. In addition, we also have electronics made specifically for use on a fretless bass.
S.D: With our electronics, whether they’re active or passive, we try to always keep things upgraded with the best components – they give the best sound! If you start putting in older components, you can get a lot of noise-to-signal ratio – you want to eliminate that and go for clarity in the bass. That’s why we use an 18V circuit – it just helps with the whole tonality, to get the right spread, especially when you hit those low notes, you don’t want the battery to be sucked out, or you start getting all kinds of distortion.
As a maker of components and someone who specialises in pickups, how much difference do you feel a good pickup can make? Do you believe you could take a below average instrument, fit a great set of pickups on it and have it sounding great?
S.D: Oh yes, I think so. There are little tricks that you can do with the circuits, with the potentiometers, tricks with the output, and custom circuits you can put in to enhance your instrument and find the sounds that you’re after. I’d say a great majority of the instruments built that are too light or too dark sounding, too heavy or too bright sounding, can be enhanced with the type of pickups that we manufacture.
For a company that is so well established, and with a name that has become an industry standard, what do you see as the challenges for the future?
S.D: When we do OEM for other manufacturers, we try to do things that would fit their purpose, fit in with what their product is and we’re pretty flexible in that sense, we’re not stuck with ‘the way it has to be.’ One pickup isn’t best for every kind of instrument – that’s why we make so many different models. There are different tonalities that come out of combinations of the pieces of wood, the magnets, the circuits, the energy, the shape of the coil – that’s all gonna enhance the sound of the instrument.
Whether it’s the shape of the coil or the bobbin shape, from four strings, which used to be the standard, up to five-strings, six-strings, now there’s seven and eight-string instruments being built – we try to figure out the best way we can do it. With my manufacturer, I do a lot of stuff with the Basslines where I can manufacture bobbins with a laser, so I can cut out any shape that I want – we can make anything, any size, any shape, any pole spacing, quite easily.
E.S: We work with a lot of manufacturers too, a lot of people might not know this, but we provide bass pickups to Fodera, Sadowsky, Tyler, Lakland, Zon, Warrior, Azola, F-Bass, Fender, Schecter, ESP, Modulus and probably at least another dozen high-end bass manufacturers.
So as each of the manufacturers up their game, you have to move with it…
Yeah, we’ve done a lot of work, coming up with new ideas, new circuits, new components and different type of coil designs. I think we really have to go along with what the manufacturers are doing, with the materials that they’re using, the type of woods, some of the graphites and in some cases a lot more composite materials. We just have to try and keep up with them.
