Re: Why was the second set of George Lynch pickups discontinued?
The older I get, pickup selection is less about tone, especially with software assisting the process. It's more about feel. Of the pickups I've tried, I know the pickups I work well with (including the Blackouts, Full Shreds, Demon, Jazz, Distortion, and EMG 60) and the ones I don't work so well with (59, JB, Alternative 8, sometimes EMG 81, EMG 85).
I'm glad you said that, because I think for a lot of guitarists it's about feel too, but intuitively guitarists want to attribute feel to things like string size, scale and action, and only want to consider pickups in terms of output, and fail to observe that it really is interactivity that makes or breaks a pickup more than it has anything to do with tone. I recorded some pickup demos because in some cases they're useful, but most of the time they do no good because they say nothing about the interactive experience with a pickup. This is why electric guitarists should really embrace the technical aspects of pickups and not leave it all to colorful wording, because technical details can foretell what it will be like to actually use a pickup, where as sound clips tell half the story and creative adjectives are hopelessly subjective.
Also, to present another counterpoint to the credibility argument, you could look at guys like Tony Iommi and Angus Young who have used similar gear for decades (Tony may have used BC Rich in the 80s--I'm not a big Sabbath fan). Anyway, I find it odd that both of them would prefer Gibson when they could have boutique builders build them whatever they like. My guess is for years they played whatever was stock in their guitars and didn't bother changing it.
A lot of guitarists just like stock guitars, they don't give two tootsie rolls about any modification of any sort. They would sooner put stickers on their guitars.
Then again, you could probably say that, until the 70s, "affordable" guitars had great stuff in them--Fenders and Gibsons from the 50s-early 70s had parts and playability in them that people now pay a lot of money to obtain directly or emulate. Angus and Tony probably had better stuff for the price back then than we do now because they started playing in that golden age of gear. Then along came boutique builders like Seymour in the 1970s who improved upon slipping quality heard in Fender and Gibson stock models.
IIRC it was the Super Distortion that made DiMarzio, and the JB that made Seymour Duncan, which are unique pickups that defined the 70's/80's guitar hero sound (or whatever, who knows), so that being the case it would be more about new and fresh rather than a return to form.
For a while in the 70s and 80s these boutique pickups were seen as a major upgrade, but now they're considered standard for mid priced and up guitars (even in my relatively short playing time--20 years--I've seen EMGs go from major upgrade in the early-mid 90s to almost universal stock in guitars of their genre by the 00s). Aftermarket manufacturers have almost completely replaced the Fender and Gibson stuff they were meant to improve upon, except for those purists who buy Fender and Gibson largely for the name or what they perceive as superior tone due to the name.
I wouldn't presume guitars are pre-loaded with aftermarket pickups because their
sound is a selling point, so much as the fact that they're an aftermarket pickup is the selling point. Crappy guitars have been successful and quality guitars have been flops, so in general, I never regard either sales numbers or marketing efforts as being indicative of anything real or audible. That's why I'm skeptical about the role of the Super Distortion or the JB in guitar history, because while it's true they sound distinctive, it is and always will be somewhat subtle and the audience will be completely oblivious. People ask "what pickups did guitarist X use on Y album?", it speaks volumes that a person can't tell by simply listening to it. So were these things really tools or fashion accessories? It's impossible to know.
Just speculation on my part. But the point is there are guys who seem fairly loyal to their gear. It's just that marketed gear, as someone said, is probably a lucrative income stream in an era of declining recorded music sales.
Another thought might be Steve Vai. He's used Carvin for as long as I can remember. I'm sure he could get more money through Marshall (upon which I'm pretty sure the Legacy amps are based), but he stays with a solid, lesser known builder.
For that matter, almost all players could sign with Marshall if they wanted and if Marshall would pay for it (Marshall probably has huge amounts of money for endorsements and their gear and tone is so ubiquitous), but some of them elect to go with other gear even if they have Marshall type sounds. This might be because maybe they applied to Marshall and got turned down, but some big names, like Vai, I look at and wonder why he isn't with a better known company in terms of reputation (Gibson, Fender, Marshall, Mesa). That leads me to believe that some of it really is about tonal preferences, or at least finding someone who will build them what they want at a mutually agreeable cost.
There's a saying that guitarists are always chasing the perfect tone like a junkie chasing the dragon, and I think that applies to famous guitarists as well. At some point though, a lot of guitarists decide they're done looking, and I'm not entirely convinced they truly found the perfect tone so much as they were just tired of feeling lost, and I say this because so often the gear they land upon seems so mundane and readily available, like OMG Fender Fat 50's are my soul mate, or those guys who swear by some random vintage amp, like a Bassman or a AC30. Long story short, when people try to use logic and reason to explain something that's emotional and gut level, they're quite possibly lying to themselves and everyone else without even realizing it, grasping at the known to try to explain the unknown. If a person realizes that about themselves, I think it makes them more receptive to different things, less irrationally biased.
