« Steve Vai's most famous pickup »

Steve Vai has been a long time DiMarzio and Ibanez user. This is probably the most famous of his pickups and is the one everyone thinks of when they hear Steve Vai’s tone. If you’ve ever seen his white Ibanez guitar, then you’ve probably seen this pickup in action. It is a high output pickup, but it still has some dynamics to it. Granted, there are better pickups out there in the dynamics department, this still had more than some of the other DiMarzio offerings at the time. It has a lot of midrange and high end grind. That’s a common complaint that people have with this, actually. He originally made this with the intent of matching it with an alder body, but I’m not sure I totally agree with him in that aspect. To me, this pickup suits something like basswood or mahogany better. I would never use this pickup in swamp ash for fear of the treble becoming too brittle sounding. The pickup has some nice bass, and it’s not so overpowering that it’ll muddy up your tone. The pickup gets compared to an EMG 81 quite a bit, and there are some similarities between the two pickups. Both are very tight pickups, and the Evo is more dynamic overall, but they’re still not quite the same. The pickup is very good, but you just have to be careful what guitar you put this in. If you put it in a guitar that’s bright sounding, it’ll become too overbearing in the high end and kill the audience’s ears. One other trick to do would be to run a darker sounding amplifier, kind of like what Vai does. They’ll naturally complement each other then. I used this in an HSH configured guitar, and when it has the auto split thing going on, it matches nicely with the middle single coil for that old school stratocaster sound.