Pickup

If you need to transport things like building materials, boats or construction equipment, then having a ladder rack over the bed of your pick-up truck can prove invaluable. Such racks also add to your vehicle’s aerodynamic drag, however, plus they can get in the way when loading certain cargo items, and they make your truck look like ... well, like a work truck. That’s why Donny McCall invented the Invis-A-Rack. It’s an aluminum ladder rack that can reportedly support up to 500 pounds (227 kg) when in use, but that folds away in seconds when not needed.  Read More

If you've tried to digitally capture a guitar performance or turn your six-string into a powerful MIDI synth using an interface or special pickup, you'll no doubt be familiar with signal lag and pitch accuracy issues. As you pluck a string, there is a very short delay before it reaches its final frequency - it might only be a few milliseconds but it can be enough to cause latency angst. Germany's M3i Technologies has developed an optical system for accurately detecting the pitch of a string - even before a player has plucked it. The Laser Pitch Detection (LPD) Pickup system runs a beam under each string, from the bridge to the end of the fingerboard, and monitors its return to photosensitive receptors in the unit. When a player's finger touches a string, the beam is shortened and the system quickly measures and calculates the exact pitch.  Read More

For most of us, digitally capturing our six-string virtuosity involves plugging an axe into a guitar interface like Apogee's JAM and then launching some software on a laptop or mobile device. Researchers from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films are currently developing a somewhat neater, and potentially more accurate, solution that also holds the promise of replacing the humble guitar pickup. The guitar's tailpiece has been thinly coated with a contact material which is claimed to precisely capture complex playing movements in minute detail and convert them to digital control signals for onward processing.  Read More

For many people, learning to play guitar is only half the battle. Once you've mastered the basics and maybe even developed your own style, you need a sound to set you apart from the rest. There are numerous amp and effects pedal combinations that can help in this regard, but swapping out the pickups on that cheap guitar for better quality ones can add a whole new dimension to the way the instrument sounds. Seymour Duncan has introduced a new system that not only helps guitar technicians to swap out pickups in record time, but also means that bedroom guitarists needn't become a skilled soldering iron operator. All you need is a couple of screwdrivers, and maybe a pair of tweezers.  Read More

The incredible guitar virtuosity from the likes of Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Stanley Jordan all rely on their string-picking proficiency being registered by the instrument's pickups. These vibrations are then transformed into electrical signals and sent off to an amplifier for our listening pleasure. Using such a setup, string movement can only be read on one axis, the horizontal. The 3Dxy pickup system reads each string twice, on both the horizontal and the vertical and is said to result in a rich, surround sound effect called natural stereo.  Read More