Hi!
Today I made a stereo guitar pickup. I wanted to send alternating strings to separate outputs to spread the frequencies. I wasn't sure what it would sound like, so made this to find out.
Here's what I did. I wanted to pick up each string individually so I made six mini-pickups that could be mixed together, and mounted them together in a P90 shape. The component parts were six small bobbins, six pieces of 5mm steel chopped to length, some flat board, and an alnico 5 magnet.
The bobbins were each wound with 5000 turns of 42AWG enamel wire, 3 normal coils and 3 reverse wound.
The hard part was keeping track of the winding direction, the start and end of the wires, and the magnet polarity - so that everything is in phase! Once done, the parts were glued in place, soldered, and then dipped in the wax bath.
And then it needs to be mounted in the test guitar - a nice Reverend Slingshot, with the pickup simply taped in place for now.
Each set of three coils were wired in series, and the E,D & B strings sent to one output, and A,G & E sent to the other. One can easily imagine other ways of doing this. Although mine is wired for stereo, one could easily be made into a hexaphonic pickup - although I'm not sure what use that would be in the real world.
So, how does it sound? Here's a little run on the guitar and the screenshot from protools. The recording was made into the instrument input of an API A2D, using the digital output at 24bit, 96KHz into protools. Then no further processing, other than bouncing to 44.1 / 24, and converting to mp3
Excuse my playing but it demonstrates the principle nicely.
...mp3 version...
http://www.xaudia.com/omnip/StereoPickup/StereoGuitar.mp3
As always, the stereo is MUCH better on the .Wav version = 5 mb...
http://www.xaudia.com/omnip/StereoPickup/StereoGuitar.wav
EDIT: There is another clip further down the thread that is a better demonstration
The isolation between the two sets of strings is actually rather good - you can hear & see on the screen shot that the two channels are very very different, following the two sets of strings. It gives a nice interesting stereo spread. The next job is to mount it properly and put a cover on to hide the mess.
I imagine this would be good for double tracked guitars with big Pete Townsend style chords - using two amps!
Stewart
(PS Macbook speakers have almost no stereo separation!)
Today I made a stereo guitar pickup. I wanted to send alternating strings to separate outputs to spread the frequencies. I wasn't sure what it would sound like, so made this to find out.
Here's what I did. I wanted to pick up each string individually so I made six mini-pickups that could be mixed together, and mounted them together in a P90 shape. The component parts were six small bobbins, six pieces of 5mm steel chopped to length, some flat board, and an alnico 5 magnet.
The bobbins were each wound with 5000 turns of 42AWG enamel wire, 3 normal coils and 3 reverse wound.
The hard part was keeping track of the winding direction, the start and end of the wires, and the magnet polarity - so that everything is in phase! Once done, the parts were glued in place, soldered, and then dipped in the wax bath.
And then it needs to be mounted in the test guitar - a nice Reverend Slingshot, with the pickup simply taped in place for now.
Each set of three coils were wired in series, and the E,D & B strings sent to one output, and A,G & E sent to the other. One can easily imagine other ways of doing this. Although mine is wired for stereo, one could easily be made into a hexaphonic pickup - although I'm not sure what use that would be in the real world.
So, how does it sound? Here's a little run on the guitar and the screenshot from protools. The recording was made into the instrument input of an API A2D, using the digital output at 24bit, 96KHz into protools. Then no further processing, other than bouncing to 44.1 / 24, and converting to mp3
Excuse my playing but it demonstrates the principle nicely.
...mp3 version...
http://www.xaudia.com/omnip/StereoPickup/StereoGuitar.mp3
As always, the stereo is MUCH better on the .Wav version = 5 mb...
http://www.xaudia.com/omnip/StereoPickup/StereoGuitar.wav
EDIT: There is another clip further down the thread that is a better demonstration
The isolation between the two sets of strings is actually rather good - you can hear & see on the screen shot that the two channels are very very different, following the two sets of strings. It gives a nice interesting stereo spread. The next job is to mount it properly and put a cover on to hide the mess.
I imagine this would be good for double tracked guitars with big Pete Townsend style chords - using two amps!
Stewart
(PS Macbook speakers have almost no stereo separation!)