Re: Sustainers and pickups

[Kim Flint <kflint@chromatic.com>]

At 03:42 PM 5/7/97 -0700, you wrote:
>> The GK-2A pickup sends an ANALOG signal. it is in fact a
>> hexaphonic humbucking magnetic pickup.
>
>neat, i didn't know that!  i have a gr-1 and associated gk-2 that i've 
>kind
>of gotten bored of, but now i'm getting new strange ideas...
>
>has anyone tried or considered making an adapter to send those six outputs
>to a mixer and panning them in the stereo field, or sending each string to
>a different effect?  it simply throttles the imagination... time to dust
>off the ol' soldering iron!
>

Sure, hex output from guitars is nothing new. That was a big part of the
Infinity guitar synth we were developing at g-wiz. 

A common use is hexaphonic distortion. If you distort each string
individually and then mix it together, you don't get the inter-modulation
distortion that you get with a normal guitar plugged into a fuzz box. This
basically means that you can play distortion chords without the extreme
muddiness you usually get. 

The VG-8 is basically making use of this too. Many of it's functions 
involve
processing each string individually. It opens up a lot of possibilities.

I think Matthias has built several processors that relied on hex guitar
outputs, as have other people I know. The idea predates Roland by a lot. I
know people were experimenting with this in the 70's, and probably well
before that. Naturally, none of them were commercially successful.....

kim
_______________________________________________________
Kim Flint                       408-752-9284
VLSI Systems Engineering        kflint@chromatic.com
Chromatic Research