A guitarist has created a wild 64-polyphonic pickup system for his master's thesis in electrical engineering, and if it were up to us, we’d give him top marks.
Traditionally, as is likely not news to anyone reading this, electric guitars have been built with one, two, or three pickups, with the Les Paul Junior, Telecaster, and Stratocaster (as well as Peter Frampton's triple-humbuckered Phenix and the occasional Black Beauty Les Paul) all being examples of that tradition.
But David Weiland of Dark Art Guitars is living up to his business's name with this eye-opening new approach to guitar pickup designs in a bid to ace his studies at ETH Zürich.
Article continues belowThe PolyMap, a polyphonic guitar pickup system, “can record 64 individual pickups simultaneously,” and unlike the eight-coil D.U.M.Bucker, it isn’t a silly gimmick, and it doesn’t require protective headgear to play it.
“The basic idea was to build a guitar that doesn't record the finished mixed output signal, but instead a lot of information about each one of the strings,” he says. “This is a very fancy way of saying that instead of two or three pickups, we have a few dozen that are only picking up one string each.”
Weiland landed on the number 64 by dedicating eight individual pickups to each string on his Dark Arts Alchemist headless guitar, with the eight-string featuring a 26.5” scale length. The extended range aids low-end clarity, without making the neck uncomfortably wide.
It also has a swamp ash body with a maple burl top, for those curious, and a “giant hole” was made to house this ungodly amount of pickups. The pickup capsules themselves are from Cycfi Research and are mounted onto a control board. This takes the individual analog signals, buffers them, and sends them to 64 analog-to-digital converters.
“Because we want to record all 64 pickups simultaneously without mixing them, the only real choice was to digitize the inside of the guitar,” he expands. “This means that we essentially built a 64-channel audio interface integrated into the guitar that then sends out one single digital signal.
“Inside the computer, we can take those 64 audio channels and get them into a DAW, and in order to do anything useful with them, we wrote a VST plugin that allows you to mix all of these signals together, apply various effects, and then get a stereo output that you can listen to on just regular headphones.”
This approach means the raw data from the guitar is recorded, rather than a pre-mixed output, so that in post-production, full autonomy is granted over which pickups are heard and which have effects applied.
So Weiland could, in theory, opt for a middle pickup-position-like setup where all pickups are active, but only add a chorus pedal to the bridge pickups and leave the neck positions raw, or bestow them with a different effect. Furthermore, there are pan and phasing options, as well as all kinds of otherwise-impossible-to-get pickup combinations.
It also means that, if he wanted to change a part to be played exclusively on a specific part of the pickup system, there’s no need to re-record. “This makes it a really powerful recording tool,” Weiland adds. No kidding.
Granted, the custom-made plugin is a little overwhelming at first glance, but it has a raft of editing features, including all pickups featuring volume and pan options, as well as output options to contend with these pickups having a much flatter and wide frequency response compared to traditional designs.
This is another novel tweak to the guitar’s tried-and-tested formula, and it will be interesting to see how the guitar community responds to it. Indeed, feel free to let us know in the poll above...
There are some teething issues Weiland is still looking to fix, but as a feat of engineering, one can only stand and marvel at them. Either way, we want a go...
For information, head to Dark Arts Guitars.
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