Hex Pickups Sale / work in progress

[Byron G. Jacquot]

>What does a hex pickup *do*?  I want to be able to control a synth,
>hopefully the simple modular I'm planning on building, from my
>guitar. Using a Sustainiac pickup and some bizarre effects gets me
>some very synthy sounds already. 

Most guitar pickups have a single coil (or pair of coils in some cases), and
send out a single signal, which is the mish-mash picture of what all 6
strings are doing at once.  A hex pickup has six independent coils, one for
each string, and 6 outputs.  It allows you to work with each sting seperately.

For example, you could use the low E and A strings to control a bass patch
with 2 voices of a synth, the use the other 4 strings to play a melodic
sound.  At the exreme, you could control 6 different sounds, one from each
string...buy you're more together than I am if you can keep track of them!

As for running through a modular, it really depends on how you want it to
respond to your playing.  A classic approach for guitar synthesis is
something like the Electro Harmonix micro synths.  They use a waveshaper
(AKA fuzz box) on the incoming signal to make square waves and sub octaves,
then run them through a VCF/VCA combination, which are modulated with a
envelope follower of some sort.  The ol' EH ones are monophonic, and just
hook up like a stomp box, and wouldn't be too hard to emulate with commom
synth modules.

If you want the hex-guitar, then you'l be looking for 6 seperate synths to
run in parallel, obviously a lot more work, but it could also be a lot more
playable.

I suppose you could also split the difference, using 6 waveshapers, but a
single follower/VCF/VCA setup, too...

Didn't someone on the list make a hex-fuzz with one of these pickups?  

Byron Jacquot