« Extreme output and used by many metal bands »

When Steve Blucher came to DiMarzio, this was actually the first pickup he made, if I recall correctly. It was a totally revolutionary pickup at the time because nobody had ever really used that dual rail system. These days, you can see single and dual rail options for nearly every pickup manufacturer out there, so he was kind of the leader in that aspect. The pickup was very popular with the heavy metal players at the time. It was, and still is, one of the highest output pickups out there. The unique thing about this, besides the rail aspect, is that the pickup is very even sounding. Before, most people generally tried to push the midrange a lot to help drive the amp into overdrive more. This was because the midrange is where the guitar’s natural frequency lives, and everyone figured that, by boosting midrange, you can get more of that distortion everyone loves. The problem was that the guitar sound would become so mid heavy that it would sound very narrow. Steve decided to take another approach to this and simply increase overall output while leaving the rest of the frequencies fairly even. It was thanks to this dual rail design that he was able to achieve that. The pickup has output for days, and it works great for those who are looking for that somewhat even sound. The problem is that it’s not too dynamic. If you play something other than the heavy stuff, it might be too hard to control, and it doesn’t respond to the volume knob too well. The neat trick with this is to throw a push/pull on the thing, as DiMarzio suggests, so you can get this really neat split coil sound that should work for most genres out there. Still, the pickup is somewhat dated these days, and there are some better pickups out there.