Pickups are one of the most important pieces of an electric guitar’s tonal puzzle. Putting great pickups in an otherwise middling guitar can take the guitar’s tone from just OK to truly awesome.
Three of the biggest pickup brands are Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, and EMG. They’re all commonly used across a wide variety of genres. Like most things when it comes to guitar, choosing between the three is largely a matter of taste.
In this article, I’ll compare the three to offer some insight into which pickup brand might be best.
Seymour Duncan
Popular Seymour Duncan Pickups
Before Seymour Duncan was a pickup company, it was a man. Mr Duncan was a luthier who studied under Les Paul (yes, the Les Paul) and Seth Lover, the legendary inventor of the humbucking pickup.
Needless to say, with such a pedigree, Duncan and his wife Cathy offered custom wound pickups in the California area in the late ‘70s. The lineup of early Seymour Duncan adopters reads like a guitar player’s fantasy league team, including Randy Rhoads, George Lynch, Slash, Jeff Beck, and Dimebag Darrell.
For virtually every type of pickup, Seymour Duncan offers vintage, modern, and high output variations. They also create pickups for bass and acoustic guitars as well as a range of effects pedals.
DiMarzio
Popular DiMarzio Pickups
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DiMarzio is a legendary name in guitar pickups. Larry DiMarzio could have retired just on the invention of the Super Distortion pickup in 1972, which was immediately adopted by hard rockers and early metal bands for its aggressive tone and high output.
Early metal bands like Iron Maiden, KISS, and Dio quickly put the distinctive double-cream pickups in their guitars, and the Super Distortion became one of the defining sounds of early heavy metal.
The Super Distortion was the first aftermarket pickup ever made for the electric guitar, and DiMarzio remains a major player in the pickup market to this day.
EMG
Popular EMG Pickups
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EMG are best known for their ultra-high-output active pickups. The EMG 81 defined the sound of early thrash metal, adopted in the ‘80s by distortion-hungry metal bands like Metallica and Anthrax.
The EMG sound is very distinctive, and once you begin to recognize it it will be hard to unhear on any classic records. These days, EMG offers a broader range of pickups, including passive pickups and bass pickups.
Legendary musicians like David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) and James Hetfield (Metallica) are known to prefer the EMG tone.
Direct Comparison
For ease of comparison, I’ll be comparing the most popular pickups from each builder to one another. Fortunately, these pickups are used for similar applications, and in some cases have been used by the same artists.
The three pickups we’re looking at today are:
Price
The price of pickups from these manufacturers varies pretty widely. While the JB, EMG 81, and Super Distortion sit in similar price ranges, directly competing with one another, there are some serious discrepancies in price when you look at some of the higher end models.
Seymour Duncan, for example, offers a range of signature and custom pickups. The Seymour Duncan Antiquity set commands prices three or four times that of the more accessible JB or 59 pickups.
EMG’s high-end Dual Mode pickups command similar prices.
DiMarzio pickups, true to the brand’s ethos of producing equipment for the working musician, tend not to get much more expensive than their initial offerings.
While Seymour Duncan pickups can get to a more luxurious price point, I should note that their pickups are not the most expensive as a general rule.
The standard offerings from all three pickup manufacturers seem to directly compete with one another and as a result I wouldn’t pick any one as winning in the price category.
Tone
The most important feature of any guitar accessory is the sound. What kind of tone can you expect from your new pickups?
Seymour Duncan pickups are renowned for their remarkable warmth and clarity. I have Seymour Duncan JBs installed in one of my Epiphone Les Pauls. At full tilt, they offer classic, creamy overdrive in a tube amp.
Seymour Duncan JB - Les Paul Bridge Pickup
The JBs sound particularly good, in my opinion, in the neck position. It’s a terrific sound for sweet, bluesy overdriven playing.
One of the best features of these pickups is how well they clean up, as well. Rolling off the volume knob on my Les Paul opens up an edge-of-breakup sound reminiscent of Jason Isbell or mid-70s Rolling Stones material.
Further rolling down the volume knob revealed a sparkling, spanking clean tone well-suited to clean playing or delicate arpeggios.
The Super Distortions I tried in a Les Paul at my local guitar shop are far, far more aggressive in tone than the JBs. There’s much more treble, well suited to high-gain, high-volume playing.
It’s not exactly warm breakup territory, but full-bore proto-metal distortion. On one hand, coupled with a cranked Marshall amp, they replicated the buzzsaw tone of KISS Alive, one of my all time favorite live albums.
On the other hand, rolling down the volume knob cut back some, but not much, of the distortion, without offering much by way of a usable clean tone. The Super Distortions are well-suited to aggressive classic metal and hard rock tones, but aren’t terribly useful for much otherwise.
My local guitar store had EMG pickups installed in an Epiphone Explorer: clearly a Metallica fan’s project guitar. As expected, they offered outstanding 80s metal tones. The naturally mid-forward sound of the Explorer wasn’t hugely noticeable compared to the Les Pauls because the EMGs colored so much of the guitar’s tone.
I’d actually argue that, if you’re trying to obscure a cheaper guitar’s sound, you might be best to use EMGs, just because you hear so little of the guitar in the amplified tone.
Palm mutes were satisfyingly chunky. Extreme bends and rapidfire legato runs sizzled and crackled with barely-restrained heavy metal fury. For fun, I tapped out some of the solo from “One” and the machine-gun muted bridge section, all of which sounded almost identical to the record.
The EMGs don’t clean up with a twiddle of the volume knob, but switching to the clean channel on the amp offered a usable, if somewhat thin, clean sound. I wouldn’t use these pickups for much other than metal with occasional clean passages.
Overall, the Seymour Duncan pickups had the most versatile tone, and I could (and do) feasibly use a Seymour Duncan-equipped guitar for a variety of gigs in a range of genres.
The Super Distortions offer a distinctive sound that is excellent for one application, but not particularly versatile.
The EMGs are best for full-power heavy metal playing, but not much else.
Build Quality & Installation
All three pickups are well-made, as you would expect from major manufacturers. They’re reassuringly heavy in the hand, and although exposed magnets will eventually corrode, nothing feels flimsy or fragile in any of the pickups I’ve tried from DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan, or EMG.
Installing the pickups, however, is another story.
To install new pickups in your guitar, you must first remove the pickups already installed. This requires some handiness with a soldering iron: if you don’t already know how to use one, please practice with some solder away from your precious instrument.
Soldering irons get hot enough to melt metal - solder is an alloy of tin and lead - and you don’t want to burn yourself or your instrument.
Once your old pickups are removed, you can install the new ones.
All three pickups come with wiring diagrams and installation instructions. The basic installation is virtually identical for DiMarzio and Seymour Duncan. However, EMG pickups are much harder to install, because for the additional voltage required for their high-gain tones, you need to install a battery.
EMGs typically take a 9-volt battery, and if your guitar doesn’t have space in the pickup cavity (fortunately, most Gibson-style guitars do), you may need to create space by putting a hole in your guitar. Understandably, few guitar players want to take this step.
EMG Pickups on a Custom Les Paul
Seymour Duncan pickups now come with an option for easy installing. The first time you put these pickups in, you have to solder the receiver to the potentiometers and pickup selector in your guitar. After that, however, you can remove and add new pickups to that guitar without ever touching the soldering iron again. Very convenient.
Seymour Duncan and DiMarzio are about tied for ease of installation, with EMG’s battery requirement a serious drawback in my opinion.
Final Word
Learning about pickups and how to install them is a great skill for any guitar player to have. It really is vital knowledge to understand the workings of your instrument and how you can make the instrument work better, and get close to the Holy Grail tone in your head.
I learned how to do it when I was a teenager. I still have both the guitar I worked on and the burn scars from an early error with the soldering iron.
It’s hard to go wrong with Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, or EMG pickups. All three are very well suited to many different types of music. The full range of pickups is much wider than I could cover in this article.
