Seymour Duncan "Hyperswitch"

[gjmalcyon]

This surfaced in my New Atlas email this morning:

HyperSwitch allows players to reconfigure guitar pickups using a mobile app

The pickups assigned to the different positions on an electric guitar's toggle switch are preset by the maker, and tweaking them involves breaking out the soldering iron and lots of experimenting. The HyperSwitch uses the power of a smartphone and a Bluetooth connection to simplify the process.

newatlas.com

It looks like a programmable pickup selector switch that gives you a whole bunch of options.

 

[fronobulax]

I was about to take a pause from yelling at the kids on my lawn and make a comment about not everything has to be done with an app but then I actually read more than the headline.

This lets you choose combinations of pickups and assign each combo to a position of the switch. Furthermore you can choose which coil is active in a humbucker and you can choose/change polarity. So you have a whole bunch or variables to play with and you can use your phone to assign a combination to a position on the switch. You only get five options at once but once you have set it up you can put your phone away and play.

Is this something the world needs? Maybe.

If I have a bass in my hands then I don't fiddle with my phone much. But if you are already comfortable fiddling - your tuner or metronome or play-a-long or recorder or... - then this is not going to make things worse.

IMO. YMMV.

 

[GGJaguar]

It looks like a programmable pickup selector switch that gives you a whole bunch of options.

Good grief. Soon we'll be using A.I. for our sound. "Alexa, please adjust the amp and effects for David Gilmour's Comfortably Numb tone". And yes, it's important to be polite and say please so the cyborgs don't rise up.

 

[GAD]

Good grief. Soon we'll be using A.I. for our sound. "Alexa, please adjust the amp and effects for David Gilmour's Comfortably Numb tone". And yes, it's important to be polite and say please so the cyborgs don't rise up.

I don't use AI, but I can already download a pretty exact "patch" of Comfortably Numb and load it into my AxeFX. The Van Halen models *that came with it* are frighteningly accurate. I can even turn on/off a virtual variac.

 

[fronobulax]

Good grief. Soon we'll be using A.I. for our sound. "Alexa, please adjust the amp and effects for David Gilmour's Comfortably Numb tone". And yes, it's important to be polite and say please so the cyborgs don't rise up.

We're almost there already. You can manually dial in a tone (and store your settings) in a modeling amp or effects box. No AI needed. I can imagine some kind of AI might help quantify the difference between two guitarist's tone but that might not be helpful if the tone comes from technique and fingers rather than amp and effects.

 

[GAD]

We're almost there already. You can manually dial in a tone (and store your settings) in a modeling amp or effects box. No AI needed. I can imagine some kind of AI might help quantify the difference between two guitarist's tone but that might not be helpful if the tone comes from technique and fingers rather than amp and effects.

It's weirder than that.

You can take a Kemper or an AxeFX (probably others) and record test tones through an actual guitar amp through them and they will replicate the sound of that amp, distortion characteristics and all. Both Kemper and Fractal (AxeFX) calls it tone matching.

 

[GAD]

Additionally modeling is a lot crazier than many people realize. I can change the speakers, cabs, and even the microphone used to record when I create a new model. I can change the tone stack of the amp and even dial in the grid bias in the power amp. It's insane.

 

[Default]

Really? Something a mechanical switch and playing the song can't accomplish?

 

[lungimsam]

Do you think one day they will just do away with musicians and producers will just dial up an algorithm song hit from AI?
Musicians will be relegated to drum circles in public parks.
“Hey did you hear Apples/Amazon’s/Tesla’s/etc. latest hit?”.
“I wanna hold your iPhone.”.
“Life in the shipping lane”
“Little Deuce EV”
Or USPS’s newiest hit “Ain’t no Mountain High Enough”.

 

[walrus]

I've always enjoyed the simplicity and relaxation of guitar playing. I'm definitely not the target market for anything like this.

Of course, I rarely am!

walrus

 

[GAD]

I know a fair number of young guitarists and none of them would use this, either. Any young person I’ve met that’s at all serious about guitar tends to start with what you’d expect and then as they progress they start to crave the old stuff. About the most “new” things I see being sought after would be things like Taylors and PRS guitars.

People get crazy about pedals, though. Yowsa.

 

[fronobulax]

Do you think one day they will just do away with musicians and producers will just dial up an algorithm song hit from AI?

It's already being done.

There is software that will produce a bass line (to something else) or a bass and drum groove. There is also more generalized composition software. Like some of the natural language AI results, the music is sometimes listenable and sometimes needs to be curated to the cutting room floor.

 

[Rocky]

The patent-pending HyperSwitch is powered by a 9-V battery

I'm out