In the 60’s we saw a revolution of stereophonic guitar, Gibson, Rickenbacher (kinda), and Gretsch brought these unique instruments to the market that split your sound into two amplifiers… and there was not much reaction. These relics can usually be found with their electronics replaced or their unique cables missing. In the ’80s, innovators tried again and developed a new technology to help with synthesizer guitars. It was called Hexaphonic – rather than two discrete outputs, it had 6 outputs – one for each string. This allowed for 6 independent outputs so each string could have its pitch tracked correctly – the same way your tuner pedal works best if you play one string at a time.
In today’s world, hexaphonic pickups have a ton of uses. We got our hands on a very cool one built by Cycfi and put each string into its own pickup! This allows us to add a flanger on one string, a distortion on another, maybe a reverb on this one, all independently! We found some really cool sounds, check them out here!
What would you try with this unique guitar setup? What pedals would you try on what strings or would you just get carried away routing strings to different amps? Surround sound guitar is a blast, too!
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Gibson came out with what they called the Digital Guitar if I remember correctly 15 year’s ago. It did the same thing as this guitar only on a better guitar and it did more. It was a huge failure in the market as no one wanted it.