A Guitar With 6 Outputs? We Play a Hexaphonic Guitar...

[@Stringjoy]

What would you try on this unique guitar?

[@TripleBMusic]

The opening theme 'Omen' from Final Fantasy VI. (specifically the slowly climbing organ notes) Played through six different amps, all in a circle to get a trippy surround sound effect

[@JonNewquist]

I would do with this what I do with my Variax - alternate tunings on demand.

[@anechoicmedia]

I'd run each pickup string to a multi-channel I/O then process each string signal in Max/MSP or Pure Data. You could then run the output back out to the I/O as multi-ch or mix them internally and send them out as stereo.

[@jotunbjorn]

Surround setup via plugins. Just go crazy with fx and routing.

[@smorrow]

I've always considered polyphonic pickups (or polyphonic *output* - there's lots of products that use poly pickups but don't expose the raw separate strings: Peavy autotune, MIDI guitar, light4sound) as something obviously desirable for all skill levels. Consider singing and playing at the same time. You're doing two things at once, so you can't necessarily hear your mistakes like in any other kind of practice. With polyphonic pickups you can easily tell an upstrum from a downstrum, and have the computer buzz at you on a wrong strumming pattern. What's more, you can still do this if you mute the strings with the left hand; it's not dependent on there being a musical tone. Good news since the right hand is what's the hard thing about singing and playing at the same time.

[@mikelee1906]

I have a 70's Russian guitar Stella that is true stereo with 4 pickups. It has a pan knob for each pickup. Off on for each pickup. Can switch to have top and bottom strings on separate sides. Also has a high/low pass filter knob to give extra contrast between pan position/ sides.. And a mute function block you pull out to dampen the strings for a muted sound.

[@njslim]

I'd like to hear what it sounded like with six massive distortion units in parallel.

[@matigrob]

Paradis made hex distortion since 1980 and the first thing you find: the non played strings are not "put away" by the played strings as you are used to with mono pickup, so high gain needs noise gates on each string. plus with high gain, cross talk becomes notable. but nevertheless, its a fantastic and totally underrated effect!

[@RocknJazzer]

nothing new, been done for decades, ie since the 70s

[@eeliskorhonen7203]

A metal zone for each string

[@senarodrigo]

I would love to hear how complex jazz chords with distortion sound. (Regularly when complex chords are distorted they sound horrible, but maybe with separate outputs they sound good)

[@benjaminflack]

This is great. First config that comes to mind: E - dotted 8th delay B - quarter delay G - light dist. D - light dist. A - strong dist. E - strong dist. Thinking a good solid distortion on the low string would give you powerful bass notes and then a lovely delay over the top of it from the steel strings.

[@Stringjoy]

Sounds like a blast!

[@Ulverine]

This is wild. It's like THE post-rock guitar.

[@Songos]

this is actually fascinating as it would allow the guitar to be a controller for a polyphonic synth. you should make a pedal that processes these separate inputs as a midi controller would.

[@Ted_James]

Very cool! Jim Thomas of the Mermen was doing something like this with his Strat in the '90s. It was wild seeing so many wires come out of his pickup.

[@AndyDemos]

This is amazing!

[@Pericles777]

I remember seeing Mike Manring (Bass player) had a fretless bass with an output for each string many years ago

[@Gosuminer]

Very interesting. If I was the pickup engineer I would replace the internal breakout board with a 6-channel audio interface so the delicate and expensive output jack and cable could be replaced by a simple high-speed serial cable. That would reduce cost and crosstalk and offer a lot of possibilities to to recording engineer. The downside would be that you couldn't use traditional pedals, just VST effects because at this stage everything is already in the digital domain. I believe I heard someone having done just that.

[@RobotronSage]

Based af

[@RobotronSage]

This should be industry standard tbh

[@aliensporebomb]

Been running hex guitar for decades - it can be used to do a really layered experience live. It's not something that has to be wacky or unwieldy. There's a real application for this type of thing in film scoring too. For an example see my track at my channel "Emperor of the Lost City of Dust". That's hex guitar, electric guitar, synth guitar all being triggered off the same instrument live and recorded with 6 stereo tracks to digital.

[@RobertFisher1969]

Hex pickups are great! Polyphonic distortion & different pitch-shift on each string are killer & easy to use applications before you even get to the crazier stuff. Note that you can do this sort of thing with a Roland GK pickup. The Spicetone 6appeal-besides being an analog poly fuzz itself-can be used as a breakout box for a GK-equipped guitar. Roland’s VG tech explores this route in the digital domain. The Boss GP-10 & SY-1000-besides being able to do pitch-detection to drive synths-has the VG tech to effect the direct signals. You can also get the separate signals into a DAW where you can apply different amp & effect emulation to each string without having to have a room full of gear.

[@Stringjoy]

The Spicetone is lovely, we have one too but it is less effective at showing off the string separation.

[@eureitz7490]

thwarting intermodulation distortion is the huge game-changer with hexaphonic which would have been nice to see/ hear demonstrated

[@Stringjoy]

Totally, when I called my mom to tell her I was finally able to thwart intermodulation distortion with hexaphonic pickups she was over the moon. Intermodulation distortion has been a plague on our family for decades-my grandpa nearly lost his life to it in the 1930s.

[@eureitz7490]

​@@Stringjoyoh my...I guess you don't understand what I'm talking about...that's cool...I don't know what it has to do with your family...and I certainly had no designs on insulting you...maybe just consider understanding that hex pickups deal with IMD...it is actually an important concept with high gain guitar :-)

[@Stringjoy]

It's just a joke

[@RocknJazzer]

That has been around and done since the 70s, nothing new here

[@Muzikman127]

I'd be really curious to hear how it sounds having each one of the 6 strings going through a separate drive circuit! (or to be really decadent, putting it through 6 independent driven amps) Not to to have different characteristics on each string as such (although I suppose you could get finicky with the dialed in sound for each string for extra fun), but just to hear how chords sound when the drive is separated out like that. You know how usually everything sort of smooshes together under gain, what would simple major and minor barre chords sound like when there drive on each string is independent? Pretty weird I'd imagine... Or even to play more complex chords and voicings that usually wash out with a gainy sound, like half diminished chords to play minor 2 5 1s for instance. To be honest I think it might be a bit of an odd and a bit of a novelty sound. But even if that's true, you could also put each string through a drive box of some kind, and then them all through one through a slightly dirty amp, and then alter how much of the drive is going pre and post signal combine! You know how progressive metal etc. guitarists are often going crazy about "note separation" in their sound, this could be a way to dial that in on demand, no matter how much gain you have! 100% note separation - all gain on the pre-combine stage down to minimum note separation with all the gain on the post combine stage! Anyway, I'll likely not buy one of these to be able to try it out, but these are my thoughts about what I'd try if I had one (or a hunk of cash burning a hole in my pocket to play around with these kinds of curiosities haha)

[@Stringjoy]

That's an excellent idea!

[@RocknJazzer]

nothing new, such things have been done for decades, since the 70s

[@Muzikman127]

@@RocknJazzer That's cool! Not surprised I'm not the first person to think of it. Can you point me to any examples of this sort of thing being used?

[@RocknJazzer]

@@Muzikman127 There are so many, the first I am aware of and own is a late 70s arp avatar, which besides being a guitar synth, has a separate hexaphonic fuzz circuit section for intermodulation free distortion chords and panned string outputs, most notably used in late 70s by genesis mike rutherford. Then around 1980 came the roland GR100 with same thing...they called hexa fuzz. tons of YT videos on it. around 84 there was the "Paridis Polydistortion". In earlier 90s there were many "experimental" guitarists doing all kinds of things like this guy with various gear themselves using misc hex pickups and many gain pedals. Then in 1995 the roland VG8 came out and had poly distortion built in too, and in all their many updated V guitar models since, getting better and smaller as they go. vg88 vg99 GR-D etc. These days besides roland there is a pedal called a Spicetone 6Appeal. Probably tons more I am unaware of as I dont keep up anymore with this stuff, to me its old as Ive already done it so long. You can hear tons of examples of all the above all over YT. Everything old is new again, just being better exposed in more recent times thanks to the net. All this stuff was around just underground pre internet and never caught on, only to be used mostly by the art music diy oddball music guys in nyc or their basements never to find a wide audience lol etc.

[@pauloing1pauloing167]

05:19 click here to start the video

[@RobotronSage]

This is huge I was thinking about this idea today (you can EQ each string individually and do a lot of amazing things such as cleaning up distortion and preventing tones from overlapping + you could have 18+ channels to work with for a LOT cleaner audio output) Essentially for digital processing this makes for a literal better electric guitar design With the current standard I feel like the output is way too ''hot'' to process digitally but if you can register each pickup individually you can have 18 (or more) seperate channels to work with Which prevents clipping with EQ adjustments Say you want to clip some bass frequencies from your A or D string but you want to leave them on your E string, you can't really do this with just 1 channel but with each pickup registering each string individually you can sort out the frequencies and this helps with amplification because amplification should be the final step So you sort out your bass you get your midtones dialled in (etc) and THEN you throw on the amp / distortion it's gonna be a lot clearer and distinct Also this guitar build sounds great how much does it cost? I think this is the way forward really Should be an industry standard And I think an improvement is getting each individual pickup so you have 18+ channels instead of 6 Tho idk how you've set this up exactly but I think a lot is possible

[@Aaron-ot3uv]

I would raise the nut height, add several bigsby effects pedals and make it into a pedal steel guitar!

[@michaelmccabe6394]

My thought would be that you could gate each string separately so that if one string is being intentionally played, small inadvertent noise on others could be eliminated.

[@fabiomittino]

Another application of the system here, for those who are interested : kzbin.info/www/bejne/nYalgmCgmaqsq9k

[@Stringjoy]

Rick is the best, great playing!

[@house-o-twang]

Really interesting stuff.

[@guitfiddleblue]

Been using Roland’s stuff for a long time. You can do a lot of things with the SY1000/GM800 etc. Tons of options.

[@Carehuea]

I wish they'd shown how its all connected to the amp and pedals...

[@brenthandycts131]

Steve Ripley did it first decades ago. Edward Van Halen, Steve Via, Frank Zappa Joe Satriani, Ry Cooder, etc, etc have them and have played them.

[@773Spair]

What happens when you perform bends?

[@jmacc9876]

Cool technology. This is really not the way I would use it. I'd go low E to a drop pedal or multi octave and out to a bass amp then probably just keep the other 5 strings routed out together through the same path if that's even possible.

[@Stringjoy]

Totally possible! You'll need a mixer to sum the other 5 and you're golden.

[@smorrow]

Yeah. You could get to 'Nashville tuning' without changing strings.

[@RocknJazzer]

guys have done that before, since the early 90s at least from when I saw them

[@tweakerofknobs]

Man, I love Danelectro

[@MagusPerde42]

Can you do this with a ghost bridge?

[@jonallen5280]

Very cool and I can think of tons of different applications... I'm just not sure the way he was using it on the video is one of them. I guess we could call it "experimental" and to each their own! At it's base, in a studio setting, it would be great to track all six strings and you could easily post EQ it if you had an unbalanced sound between strings. You could also do a octaver on the low-e only and play bass lines without have to put it on all your strings. It would also be cool to ramp up your reverbs so the reverb was stronger on your high strings vs. low or visa-versa. It seems like more control over your sound is a good thing, but finding a way to do it without it being clunky and cumbersome would be an art in and of itself.

[@Stringjoy]

Totally! As mentioned in the video that studio setting is part of how Cycfi advertises it, which a DAW plugin that lets you filter and shape the timbre of each string. This is a better example of showing the extreme string seperation.

[@xdeevex428]

This is awesome. I was getting some subtle "old west" country vibe with the reverb and the high E. Super cool pickup.

[@bahadortanzif8932]

7 of everything Jeeves!

[@deandee8082]

run thru amp then effects

[@marijandesin8226]

Supossedly Line 6 variax through Helix can do this and more. Never tried a variax and I hated the hollow sound of Helix amp sims. Sold it and got an AxeFx whag a relief that was

[@alancosens]

I think I'd appreciate this technology a lot more if I was really high.

[@edwoelfert3060]

Don't you think Les Paul would have done this if it was worthwhile?

[@PlateletRichGel]

They did. HD 6x pro

[@TheVikingBlues]

Interesting

[@whiskeymike8010]

Ooooohhh!!! Gimme!

[@forbiddensun9524]

hmmmmm if I had that i'd play some shoegaze

[@rossdevlin5251]

Why the safety glasses?

[@arbonearnobohn9975]

MUTANTES

[@michaelpurdy9165]

Idk man, cool idea though.

[@Theo-zy7dl]

???????

[@Creapture]

Very cool idea, but i dont think its sounds that great.. through a youtube vid atleast.

[@beidouvirus3978]

First! Such a cool idea for a guitar!