Hexaphonic Pickup Project

[cycfi]

Historical note: Ned Steinberger licensed the carbon fiber neck patent from Modulus Graphite. I was the inventor of record on that...I assigned production rights to Modulus, and I eventually sold my share of the patent ownership to Music Man in 1989.

Amazing. We need more forward looking people now more than ever. Hats off, sir!

[Rick Turner]

Oops, off by a few years...1981...

[David King]

Rick was the first CF neck part of your efforts at Alembic? (Starz Guitars?) Were you still at Alembic then that Lane Poor kid came through their door?

[Rick Turner]

Not to hijack the thread too much, but:

1) Yes, I did the initial work on the CF necks when I was still part of Alembic. I made the masters; Geoff Gould and others at Ford Aeronutronic (Ford Aerospace division) in Sunnyvale, CA made the molds and first prototype run of parts; I finished off the necks and put together the earliest instruments at Alembic in 1976.

2) And yes, Lane came through around 1974 or '75. His younger brother, Rob, had worked for us (last I knew, he was working for George Lucas at ILM), and brought Lane in. He did some reorganizing of the pickup production which was then happening in Sebastapol, CA at Ron and Susan's place, but he ran afoul of Susan's temper and lost Ron's support when he thought he'd uncovered some...hmmm...irregularities in finances with Alembic. 'Nuff said on that account. Then Lane worked for a little while at Star's Guitars with Ron Armstrong and did the string return/moving coil pickup project which we'd first seen done on an electric violin, though I forget who or what company made that. Would have been around that same time that Lane came in, just as we were getting out of the recording studio business in San Francisco.

[Rick Turner]

BTW, John McVie (Fleetwood Mac) got the first CF necked bass; Stanley Clarke got the second. Both were the small bodied short scale bass with the double cutaway symmetrical bodies; John's with walnut top and back; Stanley's in black ebony.

[David King]

Lane seemed to have some pretty happy memories of that time. Perhaps that was just the general indoor air quality of No Cal during that era.

[Rick Turner]

Those were pretty heady days (pun intended...); we had an amazing client list who funded a lot of pretty advanced R&D. I'd love to get back deeper into some of that kind of work again, but it doesn't pay the bills nor make payroll these days.

[Marko Ursin]

And thanks to you early cf pioneers I was able to make this.

More about the cf neck at Talkbass
Headless 5 string cf necked bass - TalkBass Forums

[David Schwab]

1) Yes, I did the initial work on the CF necks when I was still part of Alembic. I made the masters; Geoff Gould and others at Ford Aeronutronic (Ford Aerospace division) in Sunnyvale, CA made the molds and first prototype run of parts; I finished off the necks and put together the earliest instruments at Alembic in 1976.

I saw Stanley Clarke at the Bottom Line in NYC touring for the School Days album, and he had an Alembic with a graphite neck and a Bigsby. I'm guessing that was 1977. If I remember correctly the bass had LED markers too.

[cycfi]

Hello! So we’ve been busy. It’s been a while, but we are inching slowly, but surely, towards production. Let me present the Six Pack Production prototype (v1.4).

Check it out.

[Hugh Evans]

I saw this on your webpage the other day. You're making some very exciting progress, so congratulations! I've been rather busy the past few months, and your post reminded me about the article I had proposed to write up... Now I finally have some time to put something together and will be in touch shortly.

Out of curiosity, do you have a ballpark figure on pricing of the various parts? Also, while I realize string separation is a desired factor in your current design: how well does the signal hold up during bends when crosstalk is desirable?

I'll send you an email with other questions that may not be of interest to everyone reading this thread. Keep up the great work.

[cycfi]

I saw this on your webpage the other day. You're making some very exciting progress, so congratulations! I've been rather busy the past few months, and your post reminded me about the article I had proposed to write up... Now I finally have some time to put something together and will be in touch shortly.

Out of curiosity, do you have a ballpark figure on pricing of the various parts? Also, while I realize string separation is a desired factor in your current design: how well does the signal hold up during bends when crosstalk is desirable?

I'll send you an email with other questions that may not be of interest to everyone reading this thread. Keep up the great work.

Thanks Hugh. As for prices, we're still working on cost analysis ATM. As for cross-talk, if you read closely, we dropped the idea of using smaller coils with tighter focus. The idea sounded good in theory, but produced unsatisfactory results and was ultimately dropped. Unfortunately, string bending brings about uneven response and noticeable signal drops.

Let's talk offline.

[cycfi]

Hi again,

It's been a while. It took quite a bit of time to get it in the production stage. This is actually our first time to get something produced in quantity. The project has evolved into what we call the Neo Polymorphic Pickup Series. Small, Modular Active Polyphonic Pickups.

(To the mods, this project grew up on this forum (among other forums) and I am very thankful to the nice people here especially for the support and participation in getting this realised. I've hesitated posting here because I've come to the point where the project is actually ready to go commercial (very limited production for now) and I fear being flagged as spam. For what it's worth, the project is still 100% open source and the designs are freely shared, BOM, schematics, layout and all.) I'd like to continue posting here, but if you think it is inappropriate, please advise.)

So here's the latest production-ready version:

[cycfi]

Here are some sound clips:

Sculpting the Tone | Cycfi Research

In the demo, I took advantage of the flat frequency response to sculpt the tone using EQ matching in the DAW where I capture the EQ of another guitar (e.g. classical guitar, Les Paul, EMG-81) and match and apply it to the Neo pickups. The results are very interesting!

[manifold]

Hi,

Here's something you might find interesting:

Ubertar Hexaphonic Guitar Pickups - Home