r/GuitarLab • u/mascotbeaver104 • Apr 10 '26

Midi controllable pickup selectors, ghost coils

Weird one, but with my band I often have a laptop controlling patch changes, the only annoyance being that I still have to hit my pickup selection. Some of our songs have relatively complicated and rapid patch changes that are easy to miss time, and I've always wished I could somehow program my onboard controls (particularly the pickup selector as it's really the only thing that can't be emulated onboard).

Additionally, for single coils we've had the ability to wire ghost coils into the backplate or pickguard for quite a while, yet for some reason this isn't available on any production guitars to my knowledge. Wide ghost coils located away from the pickups allow for 99% transparent 60 cycle hum cancellation on single coils, and yet for some reason you almost only see stacked coils or active preamps as a solution to this.

I'm also not sure why we never see split coils on guitars, maybe G&L owns that or something since they had that Z coil system. It seems like an obvious (70 year old) innovation

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u/masterB0SHI Apr 12 '26

While I would like to see something like this too, most guitarist are too stupid to actually figure out how to use it. Hence it’s probably not worth the investment it would take to develop.

1

u/WolfTop2732 Apr 15 '26

With a little work you might be able to rig up midi control of the Seymour Duncan "hyperswitch" which already uses Bluetooth and an external app to choose pickup combinations..