EMG

Rob Turner grew up fixing shortwave radios with his father and started experimenting with pickups and preamps as a teenager, eventually combining the two into what became EMG's defining idea: an active pickup with its own onboard, battery-powered preamp. He founded the company in Long Beach, California, in 1976 under the name Dirtywork Studios, renaming it EMG in 1983. Active pickups cut hum, resist signal loss over long cable runs and put out a hotter, more consistent signal than passive designs, which is why they became standard equipment on Steinberger instruments from 1981 and later a fixture on high-gain metal guitars from Jackson, ESP and Schecter. We cover EMG mostly through the signature guitars that ship loaded with them. Here's what we've written.