Queens of Tone: Maricela Juarez
(Originally Posted: 03/29/24)
Maricela “MJ” Juarez is considered by tone junkies the world over to be one of the finest pickup winders of all time. In her 40 years at Seymour Duncan, the “Custom Shop Queen” has wound pickups for legendary guitarists including Billy Gibbons, Slash, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Yngwie Malmsteen, Eddie Van Halen, and many, many more, studying directly under Seymour Duncan himself and eventually rising to her current role as the head (“La Maestra”) of the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop. For years, Duncan aficionados have sought after and praised MJ’s pickups, with vintage examples easily identified via the “J”-suffix model stickers on their baseplates.
The walls of MJ’s workspace at the Duncan Custom Shop are papered with countless photos of Juarez with some of the greatest guitar players of all time, sporting big ear-to-ear grins. To MJ, her clients are so much more than just customers, and she goes above and beyond with the care and attention she gives each one.
"I'm not corporate at all,” said MJ in a 2023 interview with Premier Guitar. “I'm a peoples' lady... I send them little notes, not only about tone, but about personal life, stuff that's happening, saying 'hi,' saying, 'I love you." Because, if you don't do that with all the people that you love, and I love every single one of them... it's just the most important thing of all."
Juarez didn’t set out with big aspirations in the world of electric guitars; her start at Seymour Duncan can only be described as unlikely, and was a surprise to even MJ herself. The job fell into her lap in 1984, when Juarez agreed to drive a neighbor over to the Duncan factory so she could drop off her resume for an open position. MJ knew a couple employees, and chopped it up with them a bit on the factory floor before heading back home. Within a couple hours, her phone was ringing: it was the Duncan shop supervisor, calling to offer her the job.
“I started laughing,” said Juarez. “I said, ‘Excuse me, you’ve got the wrong person—I was only the driver.’ He said, ‘I know, but I would love for you to come work for us.’ I said, ‘But I didn’t fill out an application! I’m the wrong person!’ but he just kept saying, ‘I know!’”
Juarez’s previous job had just been relocated across the country; she was out of work with a five-month old baby and a new husband. She agreed to take the job.
On MJ’s first day at the Duncan factory, she didn’t really even know what she’d be working on. Turns out, her first ever project was winding a pair of pickups for Jimmy Page himself. To this day, she remembers the humbuckers’ DC resistances: 8.8kHz on the bridge and 8.2k on the neck.
That exceptional memory has led to MJ being something of an encyclopedia within the industry, and it’s very common to see the big manufacturers working with the Duncan Custom Shop for hyper-accurate recreations of specific pickups due to their high quality, faithful approach to repros. Of course, even MJ’s impressive memory banks can’t fully contain four decades’ worth of pickup building intel. Fortunately, if MJ is known for anything beyond the quality of her work and her personality, it’s her extremely detailed note-taking.
MJ has notes on just about every notable pickup she’s ever wound, going all the way back to the start of her career, filling up several alphabetized boxes. In fact, Juarez’s diligent note taking was a key factor in Seymour Duncan himself taking her under his wing and effectively making her his protégé. Duncan is also a very thorough note-taker, and he immediately noticed MJ’s attention to detail in recording specs and desired outcomes. He and MJ used to compare their notes in playful competition to see who had done a more thorough job of capturing the clients’ needs.
By now, MJ has made so many legendary pickups that she frequently finds herself recreating her own old work. When the most notorious tone snobs in the industry need to capture a sound, MJ is the person they turn to. She really understands tone geeks’ need to dial in that one specific sound, and her decades of experience have left her with few rivals when it comes to understanding the intricacies behind electric guitar tone.
“The heart and soul of your guitar has to connect with your own heart and soul,” she says, and if you’ve got MJ pickups in your guitar, you can be sure it’s got plenty of heart and soul.