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waLLaCe MarX Jr.
Putting the Hex On: the Postmodern Pickups
All guitar pickups have the same basic
components: a magnet, a coil, a bobbin
and some sort of base or cover. While some
pickups have a single blade magnet, most
guitar pickups have individual pole pieces
for each string. In either configuration, the
vibrations of each of the six strings are
captured and converted to an electrical signal,
which is then sent to an amplification unit.
Whether it’s a strummed chord or a single-note solo, the signal follows the same path.
The sound produced is universally accepted as
the pleasing sound of an electric guitar.
But back to those six strings. The normal
output signal of our standard pickups is
a combined signal of any or all of the six
strings. Six pole pieces, six strings. Wouldn’t
it seem like a logical next step to separate
the output signal of each string? In the
long and varied history of guitar pickups
it seems as if nearly every combination of
materials has been tried and every shape
and configuration explored. So how about
this six-signal concept? It has been done, for
various reasons and with varying levels of
success. The beast in question is called the
hexaphonic pickup.
The suffix hexa means six. Phonic means of,
or relating to, sound. Six sounds. Just as a
standard pickup does, the hexaphonic pickup
captures the individual vibrations of each
of a guitar’s six strings. The difference is,
rather than having a single output signal, the
hexaphonic pickup has six. So who did it first,
and what’s it good for? And why aren’t we all
playing with hexaphonics?
In questions of firsts, I have two go-to sources:
the US Patent Office and my friend and pre-war-era guitar historian Lynn Wheelwright.
An immediate problem in researching
hexaphonics is that the word itself is a bit
of a red herring in that it has not been the
industry standard term. So in this particular
case, I called Lynn first just to see if he
remembered anything like it. He told me
that the earliest pickup he had seen with
anything similar to hexaphonic construction
was on a Regal guitar from circa 1935–36.
This particular axe had a pickup unit with six
individual coils, one for each string. It was
not actually hexaphonic, though, because
even with the six poles the pickup produced
just a single output signal. On to the Patent
Office where the earliest patent I could find
using the specific terms “hexaphonic pickup
system” was awarded to Gibson in 1990. 1990
seemed pretty late. We know that Bartolini
Pickups founder Bill Bartolini was producing
hexaphonics for public sale as early as 1973.
Additionally, experimentation with polyphonic
pickups for the purpose of hooking up guitars
to synthesizers began in the early days of
synthesizer development in the 1960s.
Detail figures from a patent filed Aug. 21, 1974 by William
Bartolini for “High Asymmetry Variable Reluctance Pickup
System for Steel String Musical Instruments.”
A hexaphonic pickup can have a number of
uses. The most obvious is to send separate
signals to separate places. In the analog realm,
this might take the form of sending the bass
strings to one amp, the treble to another. That
effect was achieved in the mid-1950s by Ray
Butts, who designed a split-coil pickup for
Chet Atkins. Theoretically, separate signals for
each string could be sent to individual inputs
in the same amp where each input had its own
volume control, compression, etc. It’s easy
to see how rapidly the complexity quotient
snowballs and how a standard amplification
system might not be able to handle such an
increased amount of information.
The first Roland synthesizer guitar, the
GS-500, was introduced in 1977. It was with
the Roland series of synth guitars, which
continues to this day, that the hexaphonic
pickup found its most widespread utilization.
As a transducer for analog-to-digital sound,
the hexaphonic pickup is the only way to
go. For a guitar to control a synthesizer
module (thereby allowing it to make sounds
far beyond the normal guitar or guitar
effects palette) each string’s signal needs to
be isolated. An analog-to-digital converter
requires that sounds be isolated, from string
to string, in terms of pitch, and note start
and stop. Converted to a digital signal, the
Roland systems take the information from
the guitar and turn it into sounds such as
percussion, keys, saxophone, etc. The latest
synth pickups on the market, such as the
Roland GK- 3 and the Axon PU100 designed
in conjunction with Seymour Duncan,
represent the latest technology in the field.
Some purists may balk, but my opinion is that
synth guitar and its tonal possibilities would
have been very popular with the players of
yesterday. Alvino Rey used to have a sight gag
in his act where he would “deliver” a baby
lapsteel. I’d bet he would have loved to hook
his lapsteels up to a unit that could make each
note sound exactly like a crying baby. Taking
it in another direction, I think of hexaphonic
pickups and I wonder what it would have
been like if one of the gods of guitar like
Hendrix had had a separate Marshall stack for
each string of his Strat. Perhaps cacophony;
maybe brilliance. Either way, hexaphonic
pickups and their ultimate utilization may be
one of the last frontiers in the quest for the
ultimate electric guitar tone.
Wallace Marx Jr.
Wallace Marx Jr. is the author of Gibson Amplifiers,
1933–2008: 75 Years of the Gold Tone
