If dynamics is a big part of your playing style, then the trusty passive pickup might be the best choice for you. Take the PRS SE Mark Holcomb and the OG Ibanez Universe, both these phenomenal guitars utilize passive Seymour Duncan and DiMarzio humbuckers, respectively. Many players have used passive pickups to great effect.
Obviously, active pickups aren’t for everyone. If you’re playing a high-gain style, a set of active humbuckers can give you both the searing output and the all-important note clarity needed to ensure your riffs pack a punch. The pickups are a critical aspect of any instrument’s tone, and you should consider which pickups you go for carefully.Ī valuable asset to most heavy players is a set of high-output humbuckers. These designs incorporate a slanted bridge with a hybrid design of seven individual string saddles and fanned frets for enhanced intonation across the fretboard. A typical example would be the standard 25.5” scale on the E string and 27” on the low B string, giving added tension where it’s most needed. As the name suggests, these guitars utilize multiple scale lengths on one instrument.
Some guitar designs, such as that of the Cort KX500MS and Jackson’s X Series SLAT7, use a multi-scale format. For us, a scale length of 25.5” is the absolute minimum. That’s why 7-string guitars typically have a longer scale – the more distance between the nut and bridge, the more tension there is in the string. You need an instrument that can handle the low tuning without feeling like you're playing with elastic bands instead of strings. One of the most critical aspects of an extended range guitar is the scale length. This guitar would go on to influence an entire generation and kick start the 7-string craze that has been growing ever since. This guitar took the Ibanez RG Series template and ran with it, introducing a seventh string that could be tuned to B in standard tuning. The 7-string electric guitar can trace its origin back to the 1930s, with an Epiphone guitar built for jazz legend George Van Eps - this is a far cry from the 7-strings of today! The 1990s would see the launch of the Steve Vai signature Ibanez Universe.
Holcomb plays metal, and this signature PRS most-capably supports this enterprise, and yet it is all curves and chamfering, with no sharp edges that call out ostentatiously to the black T-shirt dollar. Every now and then, however, there comes along a guitar such as this, for a guitarist such as Mark Holcomb, and then it makes perfect sense. It’s at the upper band of PRS’s SE price rangeĭespite PRS Guitars dipping its quilted-maple toe into the 7-string market circa 2013 with a super-sized SE Custom model, it was never going to be the company’s bread and butter. Oh, and it plays great, too, with a neck profile that’s begging for a shredding, fat frets, flat fingerboard radius… Holy Moly! And when you factor in the compact Dinky body, it makes for one accommodating guitar, perfect for taking your 7-string game further. They’ll handle all those bass-heavy riffs the djent kids love, but with the multi-voice functionality, accessed via the tone control’s coil-tap in positions one and five, allied to the singlecoil tones in positions two through four inclusive, this Dinky is one versatile tone machine.
Oh, sure, the finish is way cool (PRS introduced some limited edition SE models, proving great minds do often think alike), but we’ve got to start with those pickups. Jackson went all-in at this year’s NAMM show and introduced all kinds of shreddables for your pleasure, but the updates to its Dinky Series really take the cake – not least this sand-blasted, 7-string Super Strat, which sees the ever-popular Dinky body shape housing a pair of active Fishman Fluence humbuckers. Finish is really cool, but might split opinion