EMG Founder Says Metallica Guitarist Kirk Hammett Made His Company “Metal”

If you’ve ever picked up a guitar and seen solid black bars where the pickups should be, then chances are you were holding a guitar equipped with EMG pickups. They became pretty ubiquitous in the late 90s/early 2000s, these active pickups added body to the sound. That popularity only grew when artists began adopting them into their rigs, like Metallica’s guitarist Kirk Hammett.

In a recent interview with Kris Barocsi and Guillaume Chenin from Thomann, EMG founder Rob Turner said the company benefitted greatly from artist adoption.

“The heavy metal thing was actually not my first intention. When we started making product, we were more into the studio sort of aspect of it – for cleanness of the signal. You could record it direct, you could play it through an amp… and that was the primary intent.”

It ultimately was that clean sound, Turner said, that drew metal artists to EMG. It was apparently exactly what Hammett was looking for.

“Kirk [Hammett] was the first one to actually… he called up and said that he wanted to do an instrument, but I had no idea who he was. I don’t think he knew who he was, actually.

“He was in a band and they were trying to get a record deal and all of that. But he had this purple Stratocaster that he brought up… it had two single coils and a humbucker in it, and we just simply, you know, did an installation for him while he waited. He took it back with him, and it kind of went from there.”

It’s wild to think how metal would sound differnelty if EMG didn’t get adopted as widely as it was. Insane.