I have a Railboard on order and I did manage to order before the GK ceased to be an option. Before I knew that, I came upon the NexusGK system and these pickups https://www.cycfi.com/product/nu-capsule-6-pack/ which are interesting to me mostly because I am mostly interested in the 'each string can be processed individually' aspect of hex pickups. I understand that the space concerns are already significant constraints on the Railboard but I still wonder if there might be some reasonable way to use these instead of the modified Roland GK pickups. I think that these are too big… but I also don't actually know what the dimensions of the modified Roland parts are.

I looked at those cycfi pickups a while back and even had more than a few back and forth emails with the developer. I had hatched a plan to make a home brew 12 channel pickup module based on the dimensions of the larger "block" pickup size cavity on one of my Sticks and show it to Emmett when I got it working. Well that didn't happen. Anyhow, first of all there's some thickness issues with those modular pickups because they sit on a circuit board and the whole assembly is too tall to fit under the strings of a Stick within existing pickup cavities. So you'd have to re-design the circuit board to fit somewhere else and the wiring mods to go with it as well as devise a 12 channel connector and cable, power supply, breakout floor box, etc. It seemed like a real can of worms so I decided to just play the Stick. Bear in mind I've had midi pickups on a six string electric guitar and on a 12 string pedal steel (which is similar to a Stick range) back in the 1990s and got them both to track pretty well. It's just a huge amount of fiddling, tweaking, modifying, learning new playing techniques like playing in front of the beat on the low bass strings (but not the other strings) to allow for the low cycles per second midi converter lag. But then when you get that kind of rig together and you can play it, then you have to schlep it around plus racks of synth shit, complex exf chains, amping and the floor stuff that goes with it. I used the midi steel rig mostly on "sit-down gigs" in Las Vegas where my rig sat on a stage six nights a week, six weeks at a time before I had to move it down the street. My specialty was funk B3 organ, piano and clav stuff in bands with no keyboard player. It was unique, but no one besides me cared because they'd heard everything I played, done better by a real keyboard player. One of the Stick's strengths is it's compact dimensions and simplicity. I'm inclined to keep it that way these days. Your mileage may vary.

Those Nu Series pickups look like a great project to try out. I used my graphite Grand without a PASV-4 for quite a while, using only the two GK's (mounted near the bridge) and assorted Roland VG- gear. Just an empty space where any of the stock pickup(s) would normally be. I kind of liked it and left it that way because playing slide on the Stick beyond the highest frets can't bump into a non-existent pickup.

I would say the same about any other Stick - pulling out the standard stick pickup and replacing it with a home rigged set of pickups from stock GK's mounted at an angle is maybe do-able, but I don't know what the Rail pickup depth is (towards these Nu series specs).

SE did such a great job mounting their custom pickups for the GK's, like having the cabling the correct length, tucked in, etc. - it's a shame it's not an option still. For either one or two custom GK's. I hope they can salvage that situation sometime down the road.

I did ask Emmett at one point whether he could build a 'more split' pickup than just the two sides, due to the cross-talk issues between the center strings (low bass/low melody) but Emmett said it wasn't possible. He did offer to build me a split neck Stick to try to address that issue, but I declined - it seemed too custom, and I was afraid of truss issues.
So the only solution that works for me for per string volume is the GK, where I could lower the individual string volumes via the Roland VG- modules. I think some of the custom, out of phase pickups (half stickup half active?) that some of the 'name' players have, deal with the cross-talk issue better than the straight ahead stock pickups. A lot depends on what you need the pick-ups to do for your own sound - and at what volumes.

Don't be afraid to experiment and seek out what you think you need. ;>)

It seems the pickup isn't offered anymore because it appears to be somewhat antiquated in the new age of guitar synth pedals.

Instead of doing the whole synth pickup installation, have you all experimented with the Boss SY series of pedals? They just came out with a new "midsize" option that sits between the little SY-100 and giant SY-300. This could pretty easily fit on a board, and it's got MIDI functionality.



https://www.boss.info/us/products/sy-200/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYua-uo0_qQ

The tracking on these pedals is fantastic, and they're polyphonic as well.

Has there been some sort of announcement that GK MIDI pickups are not offered anymore? http://www.stick.com/instruments/midi/ still says they are, and that page is still linked from the menu on the SE site. Though I can see that the MIDI option is not present in the instrument order forms any longer, and I think it used to be there earlier...

That's interesting. Re the MIDI-out - could that be used to send the MIDI signal to another synth, basically using the SY-200 to just "translate" the audio into a MIDI signal, similar to what is done with the hex pickups?

Going forward, I think that for MIDI triggering, pickups like the GK series won't be needed anymore, as software for polyphonic pitch detection in complex audio signals will always improve (and already exists in the form of https://www.jamorigin.com ) - perhaps something like that will eventually exist in a pedal form. With advances in "deep learning" technology this will continue to get better I think, you can do a web search to see various DSP papers on this topic.

For other kinds of interesting processing, hex pickups can offer advantages, but even the Boss SY series and Meris Enzo pedals can now do cool polyphonic synth stuff without the GK pickup, so I think the future looks bright for this kind of thing.

Hadn't seen Jam Origin before. That's interesting, Rob.

Here is a deeper dive into Jam Origin MIDI Guitar 2 that I found enlightening:

I guess I should emphasize/repeat that I am not so interested in these uses. They are interesting but my motivation is the potential for per string processing.



The person who used to alter them to work for or fit on the stick has retired, iirc.


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I'm confused. Are you talking about routing the signal from each string through a different processing chain?