Hexaphonic Pickup Project

[David Schwab]

...so it's very possible that I am misunderstanding you.

The post was filled with nonsense IMO. Lots of pickups intended for MIDI have zero cross talk, and it has little to do with the bridge or guitar they are on.

[cycfi]

The post was filled with nonsense IMO. Lots of pickups intended for MIDI have zero cross talk, and it has little to do with the bridge or guitar they are on.

Would you like to clarify your opinion? In my experience, there's always cross talk to some degree. You can make it apparent by cranking up the gain and listening to the output of an adjacent coil while picking a string. Some pickups have less, some more. This is the issue Craig Anderton mentions in this article: Put a Hex on Your Guitar - Pickup, that Is: "Firebird X has an exceptional hex implementation—they've done some kind of proprietary phase cancelation mojo that gives better string-to-string separation than any other hex guitar I've ever played."

[David Schwab]

Would you like to clarify your opinion? In my experience, there's always cross talk to some degree.

Not when it comes to MIDI triggering.

[cycfi]

Not when it comes to MIDI triggering.

Alright then, I'll just wait for soundguruman to explain what he means by "The crosstalk tending to produce errors in triggering and incremental output." :-)

[David Schwab]

Alright then, I'll just wait for soundguruman to explain what he means by "The crosstalk tending to produce errors in triggering and incremental output." :-)

Yes.. this should be good.

[cycfi]

As for interfacing, I think I am liking your idea to use ADAT optical more and more. It is simple and requires less processing and hardware support. If the idea is to have a box to connect the guitar to anyway, the ubuquity of USB does not matter much anyway since you have control over both end points. And optical is superior! More importantly, simpler is better. I appreciate your insights on that one!

There's one important factor that I forgot: port power. Bam! :-(

[Steve Conner]

May I suggest a lithium ion battery like the Variax has.

My application would accept a certain amount of string crosstalk. It's basically going to be a variation on the hex fuzz theme.

I'm trying to get this (youtube link) to handle chords better. I think if I used one channel of processing per string, and combined the signals as late as possible, it would help a lot.

[David Schwab]

I love hex fuzz. I remember trying out an ARP Avatar back in the 70s, and that was one of my favorite features.

[cycfi]

May I suggest a lithium ion battery like the Variax has.

My application would accept a certain amount of string crosstalk. It's basically going to be a variation on the hex fuzz theme.

I'm trying to get this (youtube link) to handle chords better. I think if I used one channel of processing per string, and combined the signals as late as possible, it would help a lot.

Steve, that's rad! sounds like 10000v passing through you

[cycfi]

I love hex fuzz. I remember trying out an ARP Avatar back in the 70s, and that was one of my favorite features.

Tried to find some videos, but couldn't find anything good that makes use of the guitar input. I learned though that the Avatar killed ARP in the end. Sad. I learned too that the guitar tracking mono-synth us practically useless and the only saving grace is the hex fuzz. Interesting piece of history.

I too love Hex-Distortion and Waveshaping in general. I have lots of ideas centered around this type of processing.

[cycfi]

BTW, I'm sure you all know that Les Paul actually favored low impedance pickups that are DI'd directly to the mixing board. He favored the wider frequency response and the possibility of sending the signal through long cable lengths (in a differential manner of course): The orphaned (and very rare) Les Paul Personal, Professional and Recording models use passive low impedance pickups. They didn't catch on at the time because the outputs were very low and couldn't drive guitar amplifiers well (dirty overdrive!).

Question: How low is the impedance of the Les Paul Recording anyway? I read here (from the comments): Les Paul’s Favorite Les Paul – The Recording Model that it's a stacked humbucker design with 5 Ohms per coil, for a total of 10 Ohms! Can anyone here verify that?

[David Schwab]

Tried to find some videos, but couldn't find anything good that makes use of the guitar input. I learned though that the Avatar killed ARP in the end. Sad. I learned too that the guitar tracking mono-synth us practically useless and the only saving grace is the hex fuzz. Interesting piece of history.

I too love Hex-Distortion and Waveshaping in general. I have lots of ideas centered around this type of processing.

It wasn't mono, it was a duophonic synth, just like the Odyssey (which is what it was, more-or-less). I actually found it to be a very inspiring instrument. If you wanted to play more than two notes at a time, you could assign the synth tracking to a pair of strings, and then use the processed hex fuzz for the rest. But people didn't play chords on synths back then, so no one really expected that.

I spent quite a bit of time playing on in a local music store. I would have bought it if I wasn't young and broke at the time! I did end up getting one about ten years ago, but didn't have the hex pickup for it. I looked at it more like a glorified fuzz than a keyboard synth at the time. Whenever I play a guitar synth I tend to not try and mimic keyboard players. I guess because I can play keyboards.

And yes, the R&D costs on the Avatar put them out of business. Wikipedia states: "Nearly $4 million was spent in the first year on production and R&D for the Avatar, and the $3000 machine sold only about $1 million worth of units over its lifespan."

[David Schwab]

... it's a stacked humbucker design with 5 Ohms per coil, for a total of 10 Ohms! Can anyone here verify that?

Yep, that's what it was. it actually has quite a bit of wire on the coils, but it's 28 gauge wire. They are heavy pickups if you ever handled them.

[Mark Hammer]

About 10 years back, I had a little "DIY summit" in my basement, and one of the attendees was Harry Bissell, who had come in from the Detroit area. he brought his "Muffy" guitar synth with him. He used a hex pickup sold with the G-Vox units, that easily subs for a GK-2. Rather than doing pitch-to-voltage conversion, as would be done with the Avatar, and other similar units, he simply ran each string through a fuzz to generate lots of harmonic content that could be filtered, and coupled that to his own design of envelope detector/follower. The unit was simply one of the most responsive guitar synths I have ever used. You can see some of it here: Larry’s DIY synthesizer module page

[Steve Conner]

Mark, that's pretty much what I'm proposing to build, except I'm going to connect it to a Tesla coil instead of a regular amp. I'm already using what amounts to a fuzz and envelope follower circuit, but it takes the output of all 6 strings combined. I want to run one circuit per string. I can't decide whether to do it in analog or DSP.