I’m a guitar player myself and I wonder: why? u use your pickups to have a different sound, imagine being on stage, switching to the neck pickup for a while, and the right side of the audience doesn’t hear u playing while the left is getting blown away…

wouldn’t be usefull for me tbh.

if u want to play sterio, get a pedal for it, you can buy em for a reasonable price and u can keep your hands on your guitar, and switch the left/right/both channel with a footswitch, causing no small breaks when u need to grab ur switch :) (I actually have this on my multi-fx pedal, yet only use one amp)

anyway it seems like a fun project but one limiting your abilities a lot

I recently got this guitar http://www.italiaguitars.com/guitarDetail_outer.php?thisGuitarId=6

Two outputs. 1 for the humbuckers and another for the piezo pickup in the bridge.

Blasting away out of two speakers, with two different effects chains really opens up what you can do.

hardly a hack, stereo guitars have been around almost since the electric pickup was invented.

@Numinis:

the term ‘stereo’ may be a bit of a misnomer here… just because you have two outputs available doesn’t mean you have to pan them to extremes, or pan them at all. what you can do is run each pickup through different amps or fx.

i’d rather see the two channels split across the strings…top 2 strings in one channel, middle two strings balanced/centered and lower 2 strings on the other channel. The sonic effect of hearing the music move left to right as it went up and down the scale would be pretty cool.

@dcj2… I think Billy Sheehan did split channel on separate stings with a few of his bass guitars.

I used to make pickups…. Clint Searchy a fellow pickup winder made some single sting pickups called “Scarabs” he too split the stings on different channels: http://searcystringworks.blogspot.com/2007/12/scarab-single-string-pickups-back-where.html

The Vox Phantom XII Stereo is from the 60′s, and is a good example of how far this kind of setup can be pushed. Google a picture, it has a dozen knobs and a crapload of switch settings! Definitely a bit out of control.

They really weren’t very good in other ways – mine has a neck that feels like a 2×4, and they generally don’t stay in tune for long, but the pickup setup was brilliant! Good to use for design inspiration though.

All this does is create a phasing effect.

I did guitar wiring myself many times & It’s really no big thin to make a guitar Stereo. But there are negative points:

- as mentioned you have less sounds to switch through
- you need to have a Stereo cable
- you need a Stereo (Guitar-)Amp (or two single Guitar amps), which is both very expensive and hard to carry with you ; )
- you could also make a “7.1-Surround-Guitar” which would be really no problem, but it would actually not be like a 7.1-film-sound, it would be like many slight variations stacked. But you have the risk of getting a totally wipe-out if one coil is out of phase.

Charlie Hunter, a jazz guitarist who uses an 8 string guitar and plays both bass and harmony parts, uses a Novak guitar which is biamped. The bottom 3 strings go to a bass amp and the top 5 to a Leslie speaker. This mod is probably a little less practical or necessary than Hunter’s, but maybe something cool will come of it. Personally I agree with those who say just use a buffered splitter box if you want parallel effects chains, but whatever floats your boat.

The Gretsch White Falcon and the Country Club had true stereo P/U’s in 1958.The system was called Project-O-Sonic and it split the P/U between the treble and bass strings. Their were 54 possible pick up selections or something crazy like that.

I used to work with a guy who made a pickup and effects processor which could apply different effects to each string. Slightly overkill maybe?

an ibanez GIO I believe

Godin do have 2-3 voice guitars with very versatile capabilities.

http://www.godinguitars.com/godinsolidacp.htm

My old parker fly had a stereo out. One was for the coils and the other was for the active bridge. There are plenty of uses, just because you can’t think of any doesn’t mean it is a bad idea.

you can simply get a stereo amp like a line 6. and if you want tone variation simply use a signal splitter and run one through a 31 band eq, take out the high end freq’s and kick up the mids slightly and you’ll get a neck pickup tone, leave the other as normal and wallah you have stereo!

im playing electric guitars for 9 years now and i’ve never had the urge to go stereo like that. and even if i did want a stereo tone to mimic the sound of a secondary guitarist your going to run into phase problems and to make it sound real you have to raise or drop the second guitar tone’s tuning by around 5-8 cents – otherwise it wont sound true stereo

correction

and splits the bass strings from the treble strings through 2 different amps

We actually have a proper stereo – Fender Stratocaster for sale now and it’s the only one I know of since Chet Atkins split the bass strings from the treble strings in 1956. I use an octave box on the bass strings and echo on the treble strings but you can use any configuration you like. As well as the 2 pick-ups for stereo it still keeps the normal Strat input through the 5-way switch for the neck and bridge pick-ups which can be a 3rd amp if you so wish. There is no other guitar that you can buy with 3 jack inputs. It also has a reversing switch for the stereo inputs meaning you can have treble strings coming out one side of the stage and bass strings out the other and quickly reverse them with a quick slide of the switch. This has mind-boggling effects(for me anyway). Email me at supercopy2002@hotmail.com.
Martin(D28).

Hi,

We made another stereo system: 3Dxy. A 12 mini-coil pickup (2 per string) wired to provide “natural stereo” directly from the pickup.

When you pulse a string, the movement is up, down, right ang left. 3Dxy system reads all the movement and gives all the sound.

Just listen the demos and look the osciloscope.