AFTER 80 YEARS, A NEW RIFF ON THE GUITAR PICKUP

摘要

The guitar has changed dramatically since 1931-Chuck Berry happened, Elvis happened, even Guns N' Roses happened. Yet, the component that made this evolution possible, the electric-guitar pickup, has remained largely unchanged. In August, guitar-electronics company Fishman launched an entirely new kind of pickup, one that relies on circuit boards. Traditional pickups use coiled copper wire wrapped around poles to create a magnetic field. That field registers disturbances as notes and sends them to an amplifier. The Fluence pickup, on the other hand, uses a sandwich of circuit boards to obtain the same effect. The advantage is that circuit boards, unlike copper wire, are programmable. So while a regular pickup will impart one kind of sound, the Fluence can be programmed to reproduce any number of sounds.