“Gibson had lost the recipe, not only for guitar building but for pickup making based on their original designs. What I was after was making a rock ’n’ roll pickup”: How Larry DiMarzio changed the sound of rock guitar – and redesigned the Strat bridge

Larry DiMarzio wears shades and plays an ES-335 in a garden, under a tree decorated with his pickups. A giant pink plastic dog looks on.

As a young man in New York City, Larry DiMarzio was a guitar repairman with a big vision.

“What I was after was really making a better rock ’n’ roll pickup,” DiMarzio tells Guitarist. While that may sound simple in theory, it wasn’t in reality. From DiMarzio’s perspective – which was gleaned through years of repairing used guitars, which he found to be of increasingly poor quality – major brands that he grew up loving had lost the “process for building the pyramids”.