"The birth of the Super Distortion" by Larry DiMarzio

[JohnnyGuitarCA]

DiMarzio recently posted "The birth of the Super Distortion" article by Larry DiMarzio on their website. It's a fascinating read.

https://www.dimarzio.com/stories/birth-super-distortion

 

[larryguitar]

"The Birth of the Super Distortion, or 'How I trademarked a color'"



Larry

 

[beaubrummels]

I think that's been on the site for a while. I read that story of his modded Strat and all that quite a while ago.

 

[ICTGoober]

Of course, Bill Lawrence was manufacturing aftermarket pickups before Larry.... So, he lied about being first.

 

[freefrog]

In the interview, in fact, several sentences presuppose or state that other winders and innovators were there before Larry DM and even helped him. Example with this section about Bill Lawrence:

Billy took two magnets out of a box and handed them to me and said, “Try and pull these apart”. They were the strongest magnets that I’d ever felt. [...]

Then Billy opened a case that had a thin hollow body Framus with two of his new pickups mounted. The tops were made of brushed flat stainless steel and the coils were glued directly to the plate — no sides, no base. He plugged the guitar into a transistor amp with a JBL speaker and proceeded to demo the pickups and his coil switching circuit. [...] The magnet demo was great, and his series/parallel coil switching was an innovation.

So, it seems that LDM implicitly admits to owe to BL a couple of important things (the ideas to use ceramic mags and series/parallel wiring).

Regarding the “birth of the Super-Distortion”: for a long time, I kinda see it as a "triple thick & double cream" version of a Filter'Tron, and my impression is not denied by LDM himself just before the section above:

Then Billy and I started talking pickups. I told him about the Gretsch magnet that I used on my Tele humbucker and how I liked the higher output better than what I was getting from the new Gibson pickups

So, the use of double thick magnets seems to come from Ray Butts - while Filter'Tron's might have inspired the idea to use brass baseplates and two symmetrical rows of big screw poles, even if hex screws are not the same than fillister head ones...

 

[JohnnyGuitarCA]

Of course, Bill Lawrence was manufacturing aftermarket pickups before Larry.... So, he lied about being first.

No, he didn't lie. Bill made a pickup but it wasn't a >direct replacement< and it was only sold out of his shop in NYC. Larry was FIRST to make >direct replacement< pickups. Read the article. Larry goes into detail about the pickup that Bill was making and it wasn't a direct replacement.

 

[ICTGoober]

Read the article.

Larry LIED in the article.