Hexaphonic guitar pickup experiment

[Sloan]

I read an interesting interview with Neil Young's guitar/amp tech where he mentioned doing something similar on Young's acoustic guitar. Some of the strings are panned left and some right, you can hear it on Rust Never Sleeps. Sounds great.

[unclejed613]

Ampeg made a guitar with split pickups (top 3 strings and bottom 3 strings) back in the 60's and ran the separate outputs through a phasing switch and separate tone controls. it had some very interesting sound combinations with that phase switch.

[GuyDenruyter]

Hi, do you think it would be possible to build such pickup for a kelstone (which has 9 strings)? And, would it be possible to include some DSP?

[phase_accurate]

Some thirty years ago ARP sold a quitar synthesiser that was fed via a hex pickup.

If you are using effects that generate a lot of hash (=IMD) when driven with mixed frequencies (like fuzz) or that won't work at all (like frequency dividers and doublers etc). It would be a clear advantage to chordal playing when you use such pickups and multiple parallel effect ways.

I own an ERB and sometimes I think it would be great to use pickups the are splitted and that feed two seperate EQ sections on a preamp. When the instrument spans such a large range it is quite possible that one string's bloom is the other one's boom and that's where such a system would help.

Regards

Charles

[pinkjimiphoton]

i bought one of those game controllers with the 6 string guitar on evilbay just to get the hex pup off it...gonna be fun to play with. have uses hex pickups with my midi'd guitars for years, they're very cool and useful...there's been a lot of commercial variants, even kramer marketed one back in the 80's...the thing is tho, that for most people, it's overkill..that's why they've never been more popular.

[cyclecamper]

Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead) used quad bass pickups. Sometimes even completely seperate amplification and speakers for each string. His bass wasn't mic'd thru the main PA either, instead of going thru the main board it had its own volume footpedal under the mixing board table, and its own sound system.

The idea has a lot of merit for extremely clean sound IMHO. You can make a single-string pickup with quite a bit of output but not too much resistance or inductance (which cuts the treble) if you really try.

For 'active'...something like high-voltage phantom power for three 12AX7's right in the guitar could make me pretty happy.

[unclejed613]

see if you can find an old line printer that used hammer solenoids (Printronix or older Genicom or Manesmann-Tally with the big "wobbler" cam). the hammer solenoids are about the right size for building pickups from. there were also some large (3"dia with a 3" long "nose") dot matrix printheads that had 24 solenoids arranged in a circle, and the solenoids were replaceable, and these are another source of coils the right size for a pickup. these printheads were used in NCR check processing machines for printing a bank's endorsement on the back of the check, but i'm sure they were used in large dot matrix printers of some kind elsewhere.

one thing, however, printer solenoids often need to be soaked in alcohol to get all of the ink residue out of them.