Review: Seymour Duncan Pegasus and Sentient Set (with sample)

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
This time we will talk about two recent pickups produced by Seymour Duncan, originally designed only for seven strings guitars, but that today are offered in the 8-strings and 6-strings variants too.

This is a set of a Bridge and a Neck humbucking pickups, with the neck one (the Sentient) being described from the manufacturer as a half-way among a '59 and a Jazz model, so a pickup with a not so high output, but with a nice, round tone, very good with overdrives, and with great dynamics.
An ideal pickup for cleans, and moderately distorted solos.
The bridge pickup instead is a higher output humbucker, called Pegasus, with an Alnico V magnet (like the Sentient), but that distinguish itself from the other 7 strings metal pickup produced by Seymour Duncan, the Nazgul.

While the Nazgul is a very high output pickup, Invader style, with a lot of bass and a chunky tone which resembles the active ones, ideal for extreme metal, the Pegasus has a totally different flavour:
it has a mid-focused tone, due to the Alnico V magnet, and a bit lower output (and therefore bass frequences, which are the ones who becomes more prominent with the increase of the output), and it is created for progressive rock, progressive metal and djent guitarists.

Why did Seymour Duncan feel the need to produce a different pickup suited for the needs of these guitar players? Because Alnico magnets (those mounted usually on Gibson pickups too) have a less violent and more musical (and a little more vintage) feel to the tone than the ceramic ones (used on the Nazgul), and those pickups are created yes to manage heavily distorted sounds, but also to mantain clarity when playing distorted arpeggios or single strings;
clarity and tightness are basilar when playing complex, distorted riffs, so the output and the frequency range have been adjusted (lowering them) to make everything more intelligible.

The Sentient and Pegasus pickups comes in 3 versions: the passive mount with uncovered coils, the passive mount with covered coils and the active mount, which is meant to replace active pickups with a shape similar to theirs.

A sample of Sentient (on the clean) and Pegasus (on the distorted part) can be heard on our Emissary Vst page.



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