The pairing behind every Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave record is now sold as a solderless set, built to order.
Tom Morello’s “Arm the Homeless” guitar has had the same EMG pairing since the late ’80s, through every Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave record he’s played on. EMG has now made that combination available on its own for the first time – the Tom Morello Signature TM Set.
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An EMG 85 goes in the bridge and an EMG H in the neck. The 85 supplies the output and punch, an active humbucker with a muscular low end and midrange that keeps its highs controlled rather than brittle, which is what Morello wanted from it for sustained solos and heavy riffing.
In the neck, the H is the more unusual half. It’s an EMG S single-coil built into a humbucker housing, so a guitar routed only for humbuckers can still get single-coil Strat tones out of the neck position, and that single-coil character is central to how Morello hears heaviness.
“Some of the greatest riffs of all time are done with a single-coil pickup,” he says. “A lot of times, guitar players think they have to have the most manly, alpha, distorted sound in order to be heavy. That’s not the trick. It’s the tone, and the chemistry of the people you play with. This pickup has made fields of people bounce up and down over the course of the last three decades.”
EMG’s solderless wiring system means fitting the set is a matter of swapping cables rather than reaching for a soldering iron. EMG recommends checking the pickup measurements in the instructions against your existing pickups before buying, since the routing needs to match.
The EMG Tom Morello Signature TM Set is available now. For local enquiries, head here.
