I wish any new builder the best of luck. However, I don't think the ability to move pickups around will have a large enough interested audience for this to be a successful model. Also, there's a lot of design shortcomings for what is still a lot of money. I'm a hobby, but decent standard luthier myself for what it's worth.
Nice video of a revived approach. Sliding pups have been done before but a brave move to bring to production. Yes change the pot and switch and jack positions but the main thing for me the 'positions' for the pups to create the sweetest / harmonic sounds should be assisted with a subtle marker system on the upper scratchplate for the player to SEE and slide the pole pieces in the pups to the 'sweet' positions under the harmonic points on the string. This is a very simple hack/solution for the makers to do. Owners could do it themselves with a strip of masking take and a sharpie pen if the manufacturer does not resolve. What I'm waiting for and exploring is a pup at the 12th fret ? and maybe even the 7th and 5th , wired down thru the neck/truss cavity. There's lots of positions for pups not yet explored . How about YOU exploring it ? Remember you heard it here first.!
The reason why it makes a huge tonal difference is because the pickup positions record different overtone structures/levels. At the 24th fret (and the 5th but there is no pickup) the first overtone (1 octave up from the root) would be louder than it is anywhere else on the neck. All other overtones are quieter. The more we get to the end of the string with the pickup the more the higher overtones get focussed, therefor the more high frequency focus there. So it is not strictly about small and big movements of the sting, but about what overtones have nodes and peaks at what position. So Michiel could say moving the PU back and forth is a Wah and rightfully so, ad it is basically a bandpass filter with a modulated frequency.
@@JonNewquist you‘re right. Those specific peaks are only open strings, but when you fret you are still picking up comparatively more lower overtones the closer to the (new) center of the string than on the edge still resulting in a warmer sound. This is purely because there are no peaks of low overtones at the edge of a string ever. In some situations (when fretting really high frets) however a middle pickup might sound warmer than a neck pickup.
Frankly I don't understand : 1) Why put the Jack input near from pick-ups selector and far away from playing ?!? Absurd ! 2) Why put two knobs too near that you don't have place for fingers ?!?... Absurd again !!! Phil.
For me the pickup position makes a huge difference, that's why I'm a bit pissed now because this was my 'get rich with guitars' plan. I'm still in the process of deciding if I should turn my guitar building hobby into my profession but the movable pickup concept was a big part of what would've made my guitars unique (of course similar things have been done in the past.) They did it nearly exactly as I would've. On to the next idea...
The idea isn't new, actually (old jazz guitars could do it), so I think you should just go for it and do your own version of it. These ☝️ guys did theirs, and there have been others who have done theirs. I've thought of something similar as well. Even if you end up making one and one only, for yourself or someone else, you still win for learning.
I like crazy guitars. The idea of moveble pickups are not new. I have seen some prototypes for guitar and bass from different people. Also Leo Fender has had something similar to try out different pickups and pickup positions, but very simple and it was not really for guitar playing is just was for research. Totally agree with you about the bad positions of the pods and the guitar jack. Also locking tuners would be great. For my taste, this guitar looks cool, sounds very good and is just unique. I was on the website and I could not find a price for this type of guitar... I would be good to have a starting point, from... € to... €... Maybe I just haven't seen it. Please show more crazy guitars. 🙃
4 месяца назад
An interesting idea that I had already thought about. I'd like to implement it in my single pickup Filtertron partscaster. Very cool!
Doug Wilkes in the UK was building guitars with a very similar sliding pick up system years before. He made one for David Gilmour. The information is still available online.
The string has different pitches called overtones or harmonics that all ring when you play the string. The nodes for these harmonics are found by dividing the string into sections- half, thirds, fourths, fifths etc. These are all their own notes. So one note is actually multiple frequencies, not just one frequency and it’s the relative volumes of each frequency that makes timbre. When you move the pickup it’s picking up a different mix of these different overtones and that’s why it sounds different. You can get a similar effect by moving your picking position or changing your pick angle. The simplest way to understand it could be to imagine that each note is a chord- like a dominant 7th chord (there’s other upper harmonics too ) and that by moving the pickup or changing your picking position you are changing the volume of each individual note in the chord. When you touch the string at a node point you are stopping part of the string vibrating and the remainder is what you hear. That harmonic was always there, it was just harder to hear. Distortion is the amp adding harmonics and changing the waveform by clipping. So while the explanation that the string moves smaller at the bridge and bigger at the 12th fret is correct it’s really that the multiple frequencies don’t change and you’re just hearing a different mix. That’s how EQ works and that’s why your electric guitar doesn’t sound like an acoustic. The guitar sounds very good!
Very interesting. I might just do that on my Harley-Benton TE-62cc and carve out the body to move the pickups around :) Thanks for the cool review EytschPi42 (.... strange name, I think I will start calling you Bob from now on)
I bought a G&L Tribute Legacy several years ago. Besides the guitar weighing an absolute ton, the neck pickup didn’t have the same sweet chirp as a Strat when playing on the 10-12 frets. Very long story short, I measured a difference in distance between bridge and neck pickups between my Strat and the Tribute. With a crummy hack I was able to move the Tribute’s neck pickup about 1/4 inch closer to the neck and that solved the issue. Now the Tribute neck pickup has the same chirp and flute-like tone of a Strat when using a little grit. I just love that tone.
Yeah ! A tiny movement improves or destroys the tone. A Strat middle p up is on the second node of the 13th harmonic. That along w the Q gives it that squirrelly tone. Moving it around 1/4 inch to the 7th harmonic or 1/3 inch to the sixth harmonic really improves the tone IMO.
I'm so happy to see sliding pickups again - it's so rare! I like the moving mechanism - clever way to do it simple with fewer parts or on a budget. I like how it sounds and I think that guitar is a great studio tool. I hope the builder won't take offense in my personal feelings that this guitar is ugly as sin, like absolutely hideous and I mean the shapes, because colors can always change. I'd prefer a different place for the pickup switch and knobs too. I'm toying with the idea of getting a cheap guitar kit and routing it a bit to get that functionality. I don't actually need such a guitar, but I'd love to play around with it. Very interesting video! :)
For me, this product is too experimental. I understand there is benefit on where the pickup is located vs using EQ, it's just... the EQ knobs may get you close to the sounds and are more easy to move, and to remember wich position they were. Imaging being so picky ( no pun intented) about where those pickups has to be in X position. Off topic rant: I do have trouble with guitar designers, and the years keep going and almost every company (if not all of them) keep doing the same mistake ( or so I believe it is) : On guitars with more that one pickup and a vibrato bar, they put the selector far and down!! WHY?! the idea of a guitar with multiple pickups is to switch between them, so WHY!?!?! Why would they put that damn switch there were your arm hit the vibrato bar while trying to reach it ?!?!?! I don't know if putting the vol knob to close to where your hand is supposed to be is a mistake, but I don't like that one, if you want vol swell, there is an effect called slow attack, and is not that you are always doing that effect, and if it is about controlling gain, well there is a thing called pedal vol. Well... Everyone has their preference I think...
Reminds me of the great classic line from Jurassic Park. " your scientists were so occupied with the idea that they could that they never stopped to think if they should " 😀 And 1600 for a guitar that looks Ugly A F! This is literally a guy with a hobby of building, who's just throwing it out there to see who bites at the " this is so different " and finances his hobby to learn by experimenting 😂 Probably the poorest design and ergonomics of any product I've seen in a long time!
A swimming pool/universal route will accept 4 HB pickups, tho not 4 mounting supports. W switching you can effectively choose from 7 HBs, w one every 3/4 of an inch.
The guy has a video showing a bit of his shop and other models hanging on the wall and cut bodys stacked etc. He could fix the layout issue by using a curved chrome plate he has obvious access to similar to a Tele plate idea. The pots, switches & jacks would be easily accessible and it would get rid of the goofy circular plates on this guitar. The sliding PU's would cure one thing I hate. If I set my Gibson SG Std up so I have a fat sound on the bridge, the neck PU produces nothing but a dark muddy unusable sound. I fail to see a problem with the body shape. It is hardly a Flying V and just too many others to mention.
I bought a universal/swimming pool rout body to do this very thing. Very useful idea. I don't think most guitarists willing to accept this and that like it, will be bothered by the mini body. Tho , A more Sci-fi design might look better and be more in harmony w the outside approach. W a headless design, it would fit right in.
Just a thought: if the string's movement affects tone, then wouldn't other factors that determine the string's movement (YES I'M TALKING ABOUT THE WOOD, but also bridge material, nut material, etc.) also have a role - albeit much smaller - to play on the overall tone? The truth about tonewood vs pickups vs speaker is somewhere in the middle, then, right? And it all depends on the amount of gain/compression in the signal chain. Anyway...
a lot of nerds gonna mimimimi some vintage stuff had a sliding pickups. but all i know electric and jazzboxes with sliding only was a single pickup and all really stiff and fragile stuff but this is quite cool
I think this would be a hard sell. I don't use the Tone knobs on any of my guitars but maybe those that do could fiddle with it. I think I'd be forever tweaking the pickup heights and wanting a slightly sloped rail for the pups. Ultimately do we need it?
Pretty cool. I've wondered about pickup positions in guitars and whether they're in the ideal location, and this would allow the player to determine that.
Interesting concept. I had removed my pickup cover and all the pickups from one of my solid body strat style guitars and thought the hollow space that i now had made the guitar a lot louder acoustically. Im sure there is going to be a very tiresome tonewood type debate that is going to involve name calling and since the pickups mount to the pickguard I dont know if the acoustic change will result in more or less sustain and how the sound changes amplified
@@DosHemperor My (very rich ) mate has a 1954 goldtop, it's the coolest looking object I ever held but smells kind of like vomit and dog breath. Not a feature the custom shop reissue copies
i lmfao. finally. a friend gave me a roughly cut out strat body mapple slab in 2001 ish and its been sitting in that box looking vorwurfsfully at me every couple of years.... friend said "couldnt you make me a guitar with a big pu rout so i can push one pickup around smoothly from bridge to neck position?" ideas dont belong to oneself, if YOU dont do it, the godess of creativity will always find another weird hole to blow its steam out off into this world!. great. more of this.
Interesting design, seems very cool for recording and experimenting with tones. I think i like the shape/size of that lil beastie. 21:49 pun? The hole thing. It does have a unique hole.
First things first: your explanation of the tone changes when position changes is complete and utter bullsh1t. You should know how a string vibration works. Obviously you don`'t. You could have read some things about that before blabbering Unfug around. :-( The volume change has to do with the amplitude of string vibration. Not the tone changes. Look at the vibration patterns: at every position there are different combinations of overtones. AND: On a strat are usually three pickups of the same kind. Why do you think they sound different? Facepalm. Of course does the length of the vibrating string (scale) play a role. Because the position relative to the whole string lenght matter. AND: there were guitars in the 70s where you could move the pickups. If I remember right - I have that not researched today - there was a Rickenbacker behs where you could move at least one pickup. So: nothing new anywhere in sight.
