“It delivers the raw clarity, but still hits with the force of an active pickup”: Seymour Duncan teams up with Dino Cazares for signature Machete humbuckers – and the Fear Factory riff-master says their versatility might surprise you

Seymour Duncan has unveiled a new signature electric guitar pickup that it has co-designed with Fear Factory’s Dino Cazares, and to the surprise of no one the Machete is an active, high-output humbucker that could take your head off.

But wait, says Cazares, there is more than meets the eye. For a start, the Machete doesn’t even look like an active pickup.

“The Machete looks like a traditional passive pickup, but it’s actually an active pickup with a preamp hidden inside the housing, right underneath the pole pieces,” he says. “That design gives this pickup extra bite, precision, and clarity – built to cut through any mix, like a blade.”

Of course, the Machete humbucker is built for Cazare’s bread-and-butter, huge, mechanised riffs, the hyper-kinetic judder of Fear Factory’s stock-in-trade.

That, however, is only the half of it. Some active humbuckers only do one thing and one thing only. Split the atom. Pure crunch. Saturation. They have that super-compressed quality that squeezes every riff into a fist. The Machete humbuckers eat up high-gain scenarios, but they are also wound to give you sweet clean tones.

“The machete pickup is an incredibly diverse pickup,” insists Cazares. I designed it to sound great for any style that I play, and for any type of player. It delivers beautiful, open, clean tones without that heavy, active compression, but it also gives you the precise, aggressive staccato attack that I would need for Fear Factory or Divine heresy, and anything in between.

“I wanted of the best of both worlds. The open, less compressed feel of a passive pickup combined with an aggressive bite and articulation of an active preamp. It delivers the raw clarity, but still hits with the force of an active pickup.”

If you are a long-time Cazares fan and are thinking just about now, wait, you’ve heard this Machete before, it’s because technically they’ve been around for some time now, only you would need to get your hands on one of Cazare’s Ormsby signature guitars.

This is the first time they have been released as a standalone aftermarket pickup, that you could stick in whichever metal guitar you’ve got sitting around waiting for a power-up.

The Machete is designed around a ceramic magnet, and are available for six or seven-string guitars. They are handmade at Seymour Duncan's HQ, in Santa Barbara, California.

The six string humbucker is available with black, white or red bobbins, and will set you back $149 per pickup. The seven-string set comes in with black, white or zebra bobbins and is priced $159 a pickup.

For more details, head over to Seymour Duncan.