Seymour Duncan is releasing a limited run of 500 hand-built Custom Shop humbucker sets to mark the brand's 50th anniversary, returning to original late-'70s construction specs with signatures from Seymour W. Duncan and MJ.
Fifty years is a long time to spend shaping tone. Seymour Duncan is marking the milestone with the Duncan Custom Limited Edition 50th Anniversary Custom Shop Set – a two-pickup humbucker set limited to just 500 units worldwide, each hand-built by the Custom Shop team and finished with original-spec construction.
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The centrepiece is the Duncan Custom bridge pickup, a medium-output design that helped define the high-gain era – a time when players started demanding more from their instruments. Built around a small ceramic magnet and custom-wound coils, it delivers tight lows, a pronounced upper-mid presence and a top end that stays articulate under heavy gain without losing clarity in clean settings. The organic response of a vintage humbucker is still there – just with more punch and harmonic density behind it. Paired with the ’59 Model Limited Edition 50th Anniversary Custom Shop neck pickup, it’s a combination that has sat in some of the most well-known guitars in rock history.
To honour the original, the anniversary version returns to early production specs: butyrate bobbins, long-leg baseplates and maple spacers, the same construction used when the Duncan Custom first went into production in the late ’70s. Small refinements have been made over the decades to improve consistency, but this set sets all of that aside in favour of the real thing.
Each set is hand-built by the Custom Shop team, led by the legendary Maricela “MJ” Juarez. Bottom plates carry signatures from both Seymour W. Duncan and MJ, alongside original replica “Seymourized” stickers and model stickers, as well as commemorative anniversary packaging. Available in black or zebra, there’s only 500 sets available, and they’re likely to disappear quickly.
