Whether he’s playing with Ozzy Osbourne, delivering pummelling biker metal riffs with Black Label Society, or tipping his hat to the late Dimebag Darrell in the newly reprised Pantera, Zakk Wylde never strays away from his EMG 81/85 pickups.
A humbucker combination beloved by some of the biggest bands in the world – from Metallica to Slayer, through to the history-making Diamond Rowe – the high-output active pups have more bite than a cheap buffet. But it wasn’t a metal guitar hero who originally turned Wylde onto them. Instead, it was one of his guitar students, who was playing – of all things – a Fender Mustang.
Before he became the Prince of Darkness’ right-hand man, Wylde was teaching guitar and plying his riff-writing trade in a band called Zyris. During one session, the apprentice proved to be the master.
“I was giving guitar lessons at the time, and I remember I had a Marshall ’78 combo with a master volume,” he explains to EMG TV. “I remember one of my students, he had a Fender Mustang with black pickups.”
Back in 2022, Wylde discussed his first-ever EMG encounter with Guitar World, and recalled how it ended up being a game-changing experience for him.
“I was like, ‘Wow, what are those?’ And he just goes, ‘Oh, they’re EMG pickups. You’ve got to put a battery in the back.’ I was like, ‘A battery? What are you talking about?’ And I’m like, Wow, that’s weird.’ I didn’t know anything about active pickups or what they were.”
For the uninitiated, active pickups require additional power from a 9V battery to achieve the full-bore power they offer. They are typically far hotter than passive pickups.
“So I plugged in his guitar, I hit a G chord and I was like, ‘Wow, the clarity! That’s what the amp’s supposed to sound like,’” Wylde continues in his EMG TV chat. “Because I had my Les Paul with the PAFs in it, right? It was as if somebody had a moving blanket on the cabinet and took the moving blanket off. That’s what my Les Paul sounded like.
“This Fender with the little body, you know – my Les Paul Custom had a thick body, more wood, more everything – that guitar sounded a trillion times better.
“There was just no film, it wasn’t muddled. The chimey highs were in there, the mid-range, the bottom end, I was just like, ‘Wow.’”
Wylde then went on a shopping spree, and by the time his Ozzy audition came along – and he was pitted against players he felt were only there for the money – he was knee-deep in active pickup power.
The pickups could be found in his bullseye-adorned Epiphone signature guitar, and are now a mainstay in all of his Wylde Audio builds, including the “sonically punishing” Blood Skull Bezerker and his Dali-esque Goregehn.
Quickly into his job as Ozzy's riffer-in-chief, however, he learned that the singer had some strict rules about gear, and one pickup position was off-limits.
“I only used the back pickup on the album [1988’s No Rest for the Wicked],” he says. “Ozzy hates the sound of the front pickup. He calls it the ‘cow tone.’”
Speaking to Guitar World soon after joining the band, Wylde also revealed that standing in the shoes of the late Randy Rhoads – and the plentifully talented Jake E. Lee – meant he had a tall order winning over certain portions of the fanbase. Not that he saw any backlash.
“When I joined the band, Ozzy told me I’d often hear people scream out Randy’s name during a show, but it hasn’t happened yet,” he had said. “Even if they did, it wouldn’t piss me off because I love Randy as much as everyone else. What’s really surprising is that I’ve seen a lot of handmade ‘Zakk’ T-shirts around. The fans have been real supportive.”
Wylde recently spoke about the prospect of writing new music with Pantera, and the likelihood of that happening seems to be increasing.
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