Five decades ago, a young guitar player on the New York scene named Larry DiMarzio was about to change the future of the electric guitar. Dave Burrluck looks back on the birth of modding

We’re a fickle bunch, aren’t we? A common topic in these pages is how we’re all influenced by brand, its musical genre association, by specification and, I’ll add another, name. If I suggested you try a Full Shredder, Total Metal or Super Gain humbucker for your clean jazz tones, you’d laugh.

When I was writing about Mike Stern’s long-running Yamaha signature last year, checking out the pickups and circuit I was rather surprised to find a Seymour Duncan ’59 bridge humbucker in the neck position paired with a single coil-sized Hot Rails at the bridge, wired not in series but parallel. Pot values for the volume and tone were nominally 250kohms – they actually measured 240k ohms (volume) and 237k (tone). Chatting to Mike, it was pretty clear he didn’t have a clue what actual pickups were in his guitar and had simply listened to prototypes provided by Yamaha until he found what sounded right. Hundreds of gigs later, not to mention recordings, it clearly works for him. It could be argued, in Mike’s case, that the apparently wrong pickups and the wrong pot values makes a big right.

But you could also argue that the majority of the keystone pickups weren’t designed for the uses they’ve since become associated with. The P-90, created back in the mid-40s, clearly wasn’t designed to produce the gritty and raw tones we relate it to today. The original Gibson humbucker? The Tele’s and Strat’s single coils? The clever move was that none of these pickups had names that linked them to any genre. That came later.

“The Super Distortion was the first readily available replacement pickup – uptake was huge”

This later DiMarzio PAF has more regular screw and slug polepieces

The author’s old Super Distortion, now in need of some TLC

However, if you call your pickup the Super Distortion then its intention is obvious – not least when you learn that it has a near 14kohms DCR and uses an oversized ceramic magnet. If I admit that it’s one of my favourite pickups, I’m going to get laughed at and thrown out of the Cool Tone School.