“I’d go down to Manny’s, pick up a Stratocaster and say, ‘This is like a dead tuna’”: Why Larry DiMarzio decided to start a pickup line that would change the face of guitar music in the 1970s

The surname “DiMarzio” is now inextricably linked to the DiMarzio brand, one of the world's leading electric guitar pickup firms. Larry DiMarzio, the man behind it all, started his career as a guitar repairman in New York in the early 1970s, before his keen ears and business acumen noticed that there was a gap in the market: pickups that delivered even greater tone.

“I started working at the Guitar Lab around ’71 or ’72,” he tells Guitarist. “I was going to work at a professional guitar shop around the corner of 48th Street [in New York City] and I suddenly had access to tons of guitars that were coming through the shop for repair. Or I’d go down to Manny’s, pick up a Stratocaster, and say, ‘This is like a dead tuna,’ you know?”

As DiMarzio asserts, “Pickups seemed to be the way to compensate for the shortcomings of new guitars. When I first started working on pickups, the first pickup that got built was a Strat pickup just because I had Strats at the time.”

Lo and behold, DiMarzio created the now-iconic FS-1 pickup, a replacement for the stock Fender Strat bridge pickup – and some pretty well-known guitarists flocked to it, including early adopter David Gilmour. Later, Earl Slick, Ace Frehley, Al Di Meola, Paul Stanley, and Gene Simmons all became associated with the fledgling DiMarzio brand.

“I had this fabulous old Telecaster. It was very acoustic and it rang beautifully. But it wasn’t the sound that I was hearing on Eric Clapton records,” DiMarzio replies when asked how the idea for the FS-1 pickup came about. “Being in the city with a lot of professional players, you quickly learn that – like the pros did – you could figure out hardware that worked in certain ways.

“The first solution that I came up with was, of course, to increase the output of the Stratocaster pickup. But I also EQ’d it in a different way. If you’re playing in clubs, there are common problems, so what rapidly happened was – and as you said, which was spot on, I was a guitar repairman – people came in and wanted them, which eventually led to me opening my own shop.”

Another of DiMarzio's inventions was the Super Distortion humbucker pickup, designed to perfectly fit into the standard Gibson humbucker mounting – creating a more-than-worthy opponent for run-of-the-mill ’buckers.

For more Larry DiMarzio, plus new interviews with Bob Mould and Scott Gorham, pick up issue 525 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.