Larry DiMarzo was a humble guitar repairman in 1960s New York City. There was little to suggest he would lead a revolution that would change the sound of rock guitar.
The weapon behind that sonic transformation was DiMarzio’s iconic Super Distortion pickup, a device that became known as his response to the limitations of Gibson’s humbucking pickups.
DiMarzio’s quest for a better pickup was in part personal. A guitar nerd and lover of six-stringed tech, DiMarzio was a player himself. He had a vision of what he wanted, but he couldn’t find it, particularly near the end of the 1960s, when American guitar quality was beginning to slip.
“I started working in a guitar lab,” he tells Guitar Player. “I went to work at a professional guitar shop around the corner from 48th Street, where I had access to tons of guitars coming through the shop for repair. I figured out that the pickups could be a way to compensate for the shortcomings of new guitars.”
His efforts soon paid off, and by 1971, DiMarzio had dialed in his Super Distortion. Not only was it the first mass-market replacement pickup, and it also ushered in a new age of guitarists who adhered to the “tinkering lifestyle” — messing with your guitars while embarking on a never-ending tone quest.
The Super Distortion, as its name suggests, was extremely powerful for its time, much more so than the stock Gibson humbuckers of the time.
“In essence,” DiMarzio says. “It was almost three times the output that you got from a normal Gibson humbucker.”
But why was this the case? Why had Gibson, the company that made the humbucker famous in the ‘50s through its iconic ‘Burst Les Pauls, guitars brandished by Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and others, fallen so far behind when it came to their pickups?
“Gibson had lost the recipe,” DiMarzio says. “Not only for guitar building but for pickup-making based on their original design.
“What I was after was really making a rock and roll pickup. And Les Paul didn’t want distortion.”
DiMarzio’s point is critical. When Gibson debuted its iconic single-cut, which initially featured P90s and later humbuckers, high-drive rock and roll wasn’t a thing. The LP was initially thought of as a jazz guitar and only later became synonymous with rock.
It didn’t help Gibson that, by the ’70s, its infamous Norlin era was underway, and the quality of its guitars and components were suffering.
But DiMarzio saw yet another opportunity for himself: a new era of players like Joe Perry, Earl Slick and Ace Frehley, all of whom were seeking big-time overdrive and high-powered gain. Still, he didn’t necessarily want to fuss with primitive pedals at their feet—especially Frehley, who often jokes that if he had pedals, he’d “trip over them.” DiMarzio wanted to start at the source of the electronic signal: the pickup.
As for his Super Distortion pickup, it was never meant to be a reproduction of anything Gibson had done in the 1950s or 1960s but a standalone, utilitarian piece geared toward innovation. DiMarzio agrees, saying: “Very much so.”
“Don’t get me wrong—we’ve had requests over the years to produce clones. We finally did that within the last 10 years, when people have wanted a clone, like Gibson’s, with lower output.”
But are they actual clones? The answer is… kinda.
“We’re getting a lot of demand, he says. “Everyone and their mother are going, ‘I build the original Patent Applied For, and we use panther piss and beeswax in our potting compound.’ But pickups were never potted that way. They’ll say, ‘The enamel is rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins!’ It’s just more fucking bullshit. It’s a sales pitch.”
What DiMarzio is seeing today with its pickups isn’t all that different from 1971, when the Super Distortion was spawned.
“Gibson pickups are inconsistent,” DiMarzio says. “Especially during that period [the ‘70s] of time because they had multiple spindle winding machines.”
As for how DiMarzio figured that out, he says, “I wind a lot of coils.” If you have four coils winding at the same time, and you have four tensioning devices, and those four devices are not identical, you’ll have four different coils. That’s just one factor, you know, a variation on what’s going on. Gibson was never critical.”
In the years since its release, the Super Distortion has found its way into guitars played by everyone from Paul Stanley to Kurt Cobain to Synyster Gates to John Petrucci. DiMarzio’s mad scientist pickups have defined generations of rockers, helping hone the sounds of hard rock, heavy metal, grunge, indie, and beyond.
It’s no small feat, and it’s an ongoing process. In short, the Super Distortion didn’t just change the sound of rock; it changed, if not forced, the way pickup makers and big-name companies did things. Say what you will, without Larry DiMarzio and the Super Distortion, the modern rock guitar landscape would look and sound different.
DiMarzio smiles at this, saying: “Remember, we supplied all the pickups from probably 1976 to probably 1980-ish to Jackson Charvel, right? All the pickups that were going into those Jackson Charvel guitars, including the basses, we supplied — and everything to B.C. Rich.”
“We supplied everything to Hamer and Dean,” he adds. “So the whole transition into alternate guitars that were more rock and roll… I mean, Gibson didn't leap out there and make a locking Floyd Rose guitar that Eddie Van Halen was going to play; you know, they missed the boat on all of that.”
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