Xaudia Hexapup

A hexaphonic pickup lets you record you record the signals from each string separately, either through six amplifiers, or perhaps more sensibly by recording directly through instrument inputs or DI boxes. This gives a lot of creative possibilities.

For example, here’s a G major chord, played lazily from the low strings to the high. This was recorded directly into Protools, with the notes spread across the stereo width.

Gmajor – spread

Adding an amp simulator gives it some body…

Gmajor – jazz amp

With a hexaphonic recording, it is simple to change the timing of individual strings. Imagine that we wanted the chord played tightly, rather than note by note. A quick edit and here it is…


Gmajor – all together

Or perhaps we would prefer to strum from the top to the bottom instead. No problem – we can just shift the notes slightly and we have it …

Gmajor – reverse strum

And by reversing the waveform of three strings and repeating the notes, we get this little ambient loop. A semi-reversed guitar

Gmaj & Amaj – edited loop

Now let’s get silly…
… we want to transpose part of a song, but the guitarist has gone to the bar. We can use Autotune on each track to pull each string up by two semitones to play an A major instead.  Here’s how it looks on the screen…

And here’s how it sounds!

Auto-tuned Chord – Gmajor to A major 

Of course we could have simply pitch shifted the whole chord up to achieve a similar effect – Autotune gives it an interesting glitchy slide texture as it chases the notes


By shifting the G-string up by one semitone rather that two, the chord becomes an A-minor. Now that’s something which can’t be done with simple pitch shifting!

Auto-tuned Chord – Gmajor to A minor!

The possibilities are endless!

One challenge when building prototype pickups is testing them quickly. It is easy enough to make the electrical measurements such as inductance, resistance and capacitance, but they don’t really tell you how the pickup is actually going to sound. Sooner or later they need to go into a guitar.

Squier by Fender Jagmaster ready for surgery

This Squier Jagmaster guitar makes a suitable victim for surgery. It was fairly cheap, the neck is straight  and plays well, and the strat-style trem cutout means that I don’t need to remove a huge amount of wood.

The first job it to strip the Jagmaster down, removing the strings, scratch plate and the existing hardware from the front of the guitar, and the tremolo system from the rear. Then off with the neck to keep it safely out of the way when the jigsaw comes to play.

Once everything is out then I measured up and cut two aluminium rails that will act as mounts for the new pickups. These were filed round at the ends to fit the existing routing, and drilled and tapped for mounting.

Then came the dirty work.  With a jigsaw I cut through the body to make a humbucker-sized hole. You can see just how thin the wood is between the pickup and the tremolo routings – just a few millimetres.

One more job – the bridge no longer has springs to keep it under tension. A block of wood locks it in place instead. The guitar can now be put back together.

Now the pickup can be fitted from the rear with two screws attaching it to the aluminium rails. Screw terminals are also used to connect the wires to the output sockets for the ultimate quick change experience. A brass plate will cover the mess.

Rear of ‘quick change’ Jagmaster with locked tremolo and pickup mount

Now it takes two minutes to swap a pickup! Time for some rapid prototyping. And here’s the front of the guitar with a hexapup fitted from the rear.

Jagmaster with Xaudia pickup fitted.