Guitar electronics

Axe_meister

It amazes me how little guitar electronics has changed.
Why don't we have programmable presets, (Switch to both pickups, switch bridge to single coil), etc, etc. instead you have to do a finder dance, pulling up knobs and switching.

Also why not such thing as pickup modelling. Line 6 nearly got there with the Variax, Fish man could do it with fluence but they do a pre model, rather than letting us select a model on a whim.

monquixote

Ockham's Razor 

Plenty of people have tried, no one wants it.

The intricacies of pickups don't actually sound all that different despite the amount we obsess about it.

ICBM

Violins have not changed very much since the early 19th century either.

The 1950s technology in a traditional electric guitar will still work just as well in another 70 years as it does today, wear aside. A lot of other electronics won’t, even if it’s not obsolete in functionality by then.

Yorkie

It is a well established non-fact that PCBs suck your tone. 

Axe_meister

Yet bass players get all sorts of extra gubbins like EQ, active/passive switching, etc.

blobb

I dunno, some Mansons have pretty nifty controls built in.

Roland

My experience has been that electronics are always better on the floor, or even in a rack. There are several reasons for this. The first is the obvious difficulty in fitting circuits inside a guitar. Easier now than it used to be because of smaller electronic components and batteries. 

The second is that my hands are normally involved in playing. I can make a grab at volume, tone, or pickup selector; but more than that need greater dexterity and brain power than I can muster mid song. I need foot pedals to operate my effects. 

Another thing to remember is that a guitar lasts longer than an effects circuit. Maybe not physically, but how often do we swap chorus pedals, and how many overdrives do we have on our pedal boards. Recent modellers get frequent software updates, and hardware updates too. In building electronics would be less flexible.

Philly_Q

It's simple and it works. 

If they sold guitars with a load of built-in digital gubbins you'd probably get software/firmware updates for a year or two then it would be obsolete and you'd have to replace it with something else.

Look at all the people still using Roland GR guitar synths, the Synthaxe, the Stepp guitar, Robot/G-Force tuners, the Firebird X, the Dusk Tiger and yes, the Variax....  Nobody really wanted them.

ICBM

Axe_meister said:

Yet bass players get all sorts of extra gubbins like EQ, active/passive switching, etc.

I still don’t find those necessary either. I have four main basses, all are passive - including the acoustic one. There’s really nothing you can’t do with one and an external preamp that you can do with an active bass.

(I have owned active basses too.)

Danny1969

Theres certainly an advantage in having a pre amp inside the guitar in terms of lower noise and fidelity. EMG active pickups have their fans. However you can achieve much the same by building the preamp into the guitar end of the cable and running the power for it from the pedal board up a spare core in the cable… that way you don’t need a battery inside the guitar. 

Other than that I can’t see much point in adding electronics in the actual guitar when we have various pedals we can use 

Philly_Q

Danny1969 said:

Theres certainly an advantage in having a pre amp inside the guitar in terms of lower noise and fidelity. EMG active pickups have their fans. However you can achieve much the same by building the preamp into the guitar end of the cable and running the power for it from the pedal board up a spare core in the cable… that way you don’t need a battery inside the guitar. 

Wasn't there a company that made a product like that, for a while?  I just found this from 2019, but I'm sure there was something a long time before that.

https://www.musicradar.com/news/these-powerwire-active-guitar-cables-feature-built-in-preamps

scrumhalf

Remember those BC Rich guitars that had about a dozen switches and knobs? Never caught on.

The more stuff there is on a guitar, the more stuff there is to go wrong.

Danny1969

Philly_Q said:

Danny1969 said:

Theres certainly an advantage in having a pre amp inside the guitar in terms of lower noise and fidelity. EMG active pickups have their fans. However you can achieve much the same by building the preamp into the guitar end of the cable and running the power for it from the pedal board up a spare core in the cable… that way you don’t need a battery inside the guitar. 

Wasn't there a company that made a product like that, for a while?  I just found this from 2019, but I'm sure there was something a long time before that.

https://www.musicradar.com/news/these-powerwire-active-guitar-cables-feature-built-in-preamps

I wasn't aware of that product but I have made active cables myself, as well as various guitar & IEM combined cables that had an integral headphone amp built into the cable. 

I've also made cables with tilt switch's for the kill switch sound and light dependent cables

The advantage EMG's have is the output of the pickup is very low impedance and balanced, with no reference to ground and that output feeds a differential amplifier (in the form of an opamp) So what you have is much the same as an SM58 feeding a mixing desk differential input in terms of noise rejection. As the pickup needs no grounding to the strings  it's also safer to use in some situations. 

Philly_Q

scrumhalf said:

Remember those BC Rich guitars that had about a dozen switches and knobs? Never caught on.

The more stuff there is on a guitar, the more stuff there is to go wrong.

Which reminds me of the Craig Chaquico Guitar Player cover where his guitar has bits of tape with arrows showing which way the switches should be pointing.  I have got a Mockingbird... the three mini switches at the bottom are series/parallel and a phase switch, which I don't mind.  The varitone and the boost are completely useless.

BobHillman

scrumhalf said:

Remember those BC Rich guitars that had about a dozen switches and knobs? Never caught on.

The more stuff there is on a guitar, the more stuff there is to go wrong.

And the greater the potential for accidentally muting the output.

xOilCityPickups

ICBM said:

Violins have not changed very much since the early 19th century either.

The 1950s technology in a traditional electric guitar will still work just as well in another 70 years as it does today, wear aside. A lot of other electronics won’t, even if it’s not obsolete in functionality by then.

This

Revolutions

The one thing I'm surprised that hasn't taken off more is solderless pickups & pots. That said, how many times do I change pickups on a guitar? 0-2 times in the lifetime of ownership. Not really woth it for that. But modular pots etc is something that EMG kinda do & it's cool to think you could rapidly pop in 100k pots etc..

maltingsaudio

Who remembers the Shergold Modulator? Fantastic idea. Personally anything which pushes the envelope on a very old design spikes my interest. Then of course with all music related technology, it will go seriously out of fashion for a long period of time, then become the must have item of vintage gear at eye watering prices. Unless of course it’s a Fairlight.

https://www.shergold.co.uk/modules.html

Funkfingers

Ladeezangentlemen, in the red corner, the VOX GuitOrgan. Loads of ways to sound shite … if it condescends to work.

In the blue corner, the Gibson Les Paul Junior. One pickup, two controls. In skilled hands, a source of almost infinite variety.

Philly_Q

Revolutions said:

The one thing I'm surprised that hasn't taken off more is solderless pickups & pots. That said, how many times do I change pickups on a guitar? 0-2 times in the lifetime of ownership. Not really woth it for that. But modular pots etc is something that EMG kinda do & it's cool to think you could rapidly pop in 100k pots etc..

Apart from the convenience of making modifications easily reversible, I don't see the appeal.  The solderless connectors and terminals are bulky and use up much of what's often quite a confined space.  I realise not everyone can solder, it takes a while to learn but if you can do it yourself, or get someone else to do it, it's so much neater.  And it's less likely that anything will come loose.

hexaphone

Joel from Cycfi has been working on pickup modelling.  He gave a demo of some emulated Strat sounds a while ago.

https://www.cycfi.com/2020/11/virtual-pickups-part-5/#:~:text=Here are the A/B

His software for the virtual pickups is still in development. It can emulate multiple virtual pickups from a single multi-channel input, and move the virtual positions around (even up to the twelfth fret).  He posted a video of an early version which already sounded good, but there's been a long wait because Joel took on so many goals at once.

He's custom-building a carbon-fiber 'infinity' guitar with an e-whammy bar that can give CV or midi output, per-string (polyphonic) infinite sustain, and multi-channel pickups which are low-impedance with a uniform frequency response.  Also he's built a single-channel pickup with uniform response that can be used in a more conventional guitar with a filter to adjust the tone:

The big difference from Variax and Fishman's products (and the reason I'm a fan of Cycfi) is that Joel publishes his work open source, including PCB designs.  He explains the technology well in the documentation too.  It looks like his company are keeping their hardware open, modular and reasonably maintainable.  Their aim is for the software to also run inside a pedal, using something like a raspberry pi.

The electronics in their Thor guitar is also much simpler than a guitar like the Moog E1, where the embedded hardware did a lot of the work that Joel plans to do in software.  The insides of the moog look really hard to service compared to Cycfi's modules, which are all replaceable:

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/moog-guitar

https://www.cycfi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/thor-inside.webp

This is how the current software looks for for Cycfi's virtual pickups:

https://www.cycfi.com/assets/Ascend-VPU.pdf

I hope some interesting new music will be made using Cycfi's infinity system too.  At the moment I can't find any good demos of the sustain on the Thor guitar MKI, but they say it's been designed to allow subtle polyphonic sustain, so should be quite different from the Sustainiac.