GEORGE LYNCH
because they have enough drive where it
actually compresses the sound too much and
kind of destroys the frequency range to a certain extent. I think if you can get away without
overdrive that’s the best thing.
nickel content, a different core diameter,
metal composition and they are wound to
pitch, which means the machines wind at a
slower speed. That tends to keep the intonation intact.
Let’s talk about your guitars that are up in
more normal registers. I saw Seth Lovers
and all sorts of Duncans in your guitars.
Do you just kind of pick
the one that’s right for
that guitar?
by the time you get a new pickup on there
you’ve forgotten what the old one sounded
like. So what I tend to do is record the guitar with the pickup that I have in it, take the
strings off, change the pickup, put the strings
back on and record that onto another track.
I use all the same conditions and I do that a
number of times, then I go back and listen.
One of your newer signature projects is
with ZOOM – how did the development
of that go?
Absolutely, I sort of steer
to the Seymour Duncan
Screamin’ Demon pickup
on heavier-weight guitars. I
tend to use lighter guitars
these days, in the 8. 5 to 9
lb range; I like the way they
resonate. I’m also kind of
steering away from maple
and going to alder. The
alder with a maple top,
maple neck with a maple
cap, you get the brightness
and the pop, but you still
get the warmth.
I’d been working with
ZOOM, giving them my opinions on different pieces of
digital gear, and that evolved
to a point where they wanted
to do my own pedal.
We developed a Super
V pickup for lighter guitars, which has a kind of a
unique design in that each
coil is wound differently
with different materials and
different gauged wire. It’s
a very Seth Lover-ish kind
of pickup with a little more
output. It’s what a lot of
people try to do – create
something PAF-ish – but
with a little more to it. But
the Screamin’ Demon is
pretty much my default
pickup, although I do dabble in other Duncan pickups. I’ll even try some
pickups from other manufacturers here and
there just to know what’s out there. I usually
try to get my hands on a lot of different things
and see how they react in my guitars.
What a lot of guys do for
signature stuff is take something that’s already made,
twiddle a few knobs, save it
as a preset, and there you
go. I didn’t want to do that
because there’s a limited
amount of stuff you can do
when you modify a pedal
that way – you have to deal
within the parameters of the
pedal itself. I wanted to go
into the studio with all kinds
of gear, with an engineer for
a matter of about a week
and record different .wav
files with different sounds.
Let’s talk about string gauge and things of
that nature. You use 13s on the low B stuff
and you kind of mix things up a little bit on
your standard tuned guitars.
On most of my guitars I go with the lighter
gauge as I get to the heavier strings. The low
E is usually lighter than what you’d expect
and the top is a litter bit heavier than what
you’d expect. I like the gauge to be a little
more evenly displaced rather than extreme. I
don’t like light tops and heavy bottoms.
I think you really have to find the right pickup
for the specific guitar. All pickups sound different depending on the weight of the guitar
and the properties of that specific instrument. What I hate about pickups is trying to
find that magic combination because it’s not
easy. You sit around with a soldering gun all
day taking strings off, putting pickups in and
PG EXPERIENCE: GEORGE LYNCH OCT 2008
For instance, we took a real
Leslie and recorded that
with an old Marshall, with
a Les Paul, and created
sounds from that. We’d go
old cabinet, old speakers,
old pedals, Lynch Boxes, old
Super Reverbs, weird amps
like WEM Dominators and
old tweed Fenders with 12-
string guitars, different Strats, Teles, Esquires,
Les Pauls and ESPs. For one of the lead tones
I use an original EP- 1, a 1960s Tube Echoplex.
Where are you going to find one of those
– much less afford one? I used an old MXR
Phase 90 Script Logo, which again, is very difficult to find and very expensive – that’s the old
Eddie thing from “Eruption” and other solos.
Then we burnt all these .wav files to a chip and
they created the algorithms from there. These
are all sounds designed from the bottom up
specifically for this pedal.
My signature Dean Markleys have a higher
It’s pretty cool that you didn’t just slap your
