The Ambrosonics Pickup Director, a programmable pickup switching system, is now available for various guitar models.
It is a small PC board that fits inside your guitar, and radically expands your tonal palette via its patented optical switching technology.
Ambrosonics designed the Pickup Director to make your guitar more efficient by allowing for a wide variety of pickup combinations. It comes in the form of a small PC board that you can easily install into your guitar. It has a dedicated switch and a push/pull tone knob that doubles as your pickup switching selector.
I have always wondered why the big guns in the guitar making industry does not exert effort in improving and expanding their guitar’s tonal palette. If they exerted the same effort as they do on their countless vintage-reissue instruments and relic finishes, we would probably be seeing more guitars with innovative features.
To be fair, at least we are now seeing a number of new instruments from big name manufacturers with split/coil tap features, however their technology is relatively simplistic when compared to what products like the “Pickup Director” has to offer.
Once installed, this switching system will allow pickups to be wired in series, parallel, series/parallel, in-phase and out-of-phase. You can also use it to blend the piezo sound on piezo equipped guitars. Each of these combinations give out a unique tonality, this means that you can conjure more sounds from your favorite axe.
Pulling the tone pot will let you access the tone menu, which you can use to audition the various sounds that different pickup wiring configurations produce. Pushing down the tone pot will save the sound you prefer into the pick selector slot, which would be either a 3-position or a 5 position blade switch depending on your guitar.
Here is a demo of the Pickup Director:
Another cool feature of the Pickup Director is its expandability, it has connections for Ambrosonics’ Mezzanine Expander boards that allow Hum, Single, Hum configurations, along with programmable 2 band, 3 band or 4 band EQ. More tone shaping features are also planned in the future.
For more information on the Pickup Director, you can visit Ambrosonics.
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