Øivind’s 9 string Strandberg is undergoing continuous evolution. Thankfully, he’s adventurous enough to be on the “Bleeding Edge”, so to speak, and patient enough to wait, given the indeterminate pace of research and development. He’s also a brilliant player, and hopefully, we can collaborate on making some audio samples with his Cycfi equipped Strandberg.
Here’s the latest and greatest picture of the sleekModula 5+4 prototype. Each pickup will typically have at least two modules. See A New Breed of Pickups article, if you have no idea what I am talking about. The Modula is “a full-range, semi-modular pickup”. Three module types can accommodate all guitars and basses (and beyond?). Combinations of these module types, Modula A, Modula B, and Modula C, can fit instruments with any string spacing and number of strings.
What has changed in this latest iteration? Most significantly, we moved back to single coils per module, instead of double coils per module as presented in the initial article. Why? We found out that the coils tend to cancel each coil’s signal the closer the proximity. Notice that each module is already half a Strat pickup. The signal becomes quite weak, requiring more gain in the preamplifier, which means more broadband noise. Having a single coil per module, and two modules per pickup will still be hum cancelling, by pairing each coil with an opposing coil. There are now two additional variants per module type. One for north facing up, coils clockwise and another for south facing up, coils counter-clockwise. The tricky part was balancing the different types of coils for different module sizes for optimum hum cancellation. We had to balance the signal output as well as the inductance of every coil. Easy said than done! It took us a while to obtain the right balance with the lowest noise regardless of module type pair combinations.
That Modula pickup will be paired with this Nu Multi 9:
