They sound phenomenal! The tone is amazing. I could not think of a better pickup for the Strandberg!! Thanks for the info! I think at some point I will try out the resonant filter. The idea of even more tonal options is really appealing! I am just amazed by the quality and the tone I get out of my guitar from your pickups!
Steven Ruiz
Man, seriously, the set of NUs you built for me blow my mind every time I turn them on. Their ability to catch every overtone of my guitar. Their ability to replicate true and not color the pure acoustic sound has certainly served me well for my project. The NUs signal is so pure that I can see them pickup the guitar’s natural tone on my oscilloscope. It is wonderful to see now how you can purposely color and paint with it in its next evolution. Well done, sir!
Brent Kerner
The XR system with resonant filter is by far the very best pickup system I have played on any guitar anywhere! This system really is the lightning in a bottle secret sauce I have been looking for for years! Can’t wait to try the NU 2.0!
There is no one single greater investment in your guitar tone that can be made by replacing frequency squishing and tone sapping old technology with Cycfi pickups!
Erik Phariss guitar player, designer and tone hound.
I know a guy who has the NUs and loves them. He is me. For all my gear head music type friends. Cycfi.com is designing and building some amazing open source hardware. The latest are some very special guitar pickups. Joel de Guzman, the leader of the band, as it were, there has been incredibly helpful and supportive with a project I’ve been working on. I’ve experimented with two generations of his polyphonic pickups. Read about them, and other cycfi projects.
If anyone among my friends, or the general public, is at all interested in some truly amazing audio projects, they should check out cycfi.com. What’s so amazing? First off, I can attest to the clean sound of the Nu pickups. They are essentially flat from 20 to 20k Hz. I’ve tried the Nu1s. Single string pickups for polyphonic applications. You can process each string separately, if you want to.
More amazing, the pickups and all the Cycfi projects are open source, and supported by a very knowledgeable and growing community.
Quality for sure. My Nus are lovely, behave perfectly, sound clear and clean, and have impressed some impressive people.
Alan Pagliere
— The sound is awesome! Only had a few minutes to play with it but am really impressed. Joel you are a genius!
— Been playing for a couple of hours this eve. Loving this pickup! The separation between the strings is incredible, no cross talk and the tones I am able to get have got me excited. I had been using the Roland Gk3 for individual string processing, it just doesn’t come anywhere near as good as the Neo. Can’t wait to get the sensors rewired and start experimenting. Cheers Joel great job!
— I have the original Neo pickup installed in my guitar. I originally did not intend to use the guitar with my VG 99. Therefore, I placed the pickup 50mm away from bridge to suite my needs. I have recently started using it with a VG99 and GP 10. I have had absolutely no issues with this set up at all. The GP 10 however, does sound better and tracks midi much more accurately than the VG 99. Boss have made many improvements with the GP 10 though it does have fewer features. Also, for a short while I had a GK 3 pickup installed alongside the Neo In order to compare the two. I must say the Neo out performs the GK in all respects, even with it being so much further away from the bridge than recommended. The added advantage with the GP 10 is that It gives me digital out via USB for each string. This means I can blend the sound of the Neo and the modeled sounds in my DAW. As the GP 10 is outputting the individual strings without any processing. Any tunings in the modeled guitar will not be reflected in individual strings output by the Neo. I overcome this by using an instance of guitar rig on each string and use its pitch shifting to achieve the same tuning as the modeled guitar.
— Joel, your Neo pickup has given me the edge. Am creating some mad sounds with it allowing me to stand out from the rest!
Jaydev Mistry
And I confirmed the set offer outstanding sound performance too (Especialy center position !:)).
Takuya Nishiike
Hey Joel, Happy Holidays to ya! Bill took me on a run through a set of your pickups today and I really was blown away totally unexpected but right up my alley! I’m sitting here playing guitar right now hating my pickups so one dimensional haha thanks Bill! Very cool stuff Joel, hope all is well.
It’s a undeniable gear essential, every tonal range in the palm of your hand! Playing any other guitar/pick up after that experience is a loss! So versatile, from Jazz, Blues, Country, Rockabilly, Metal this is sure to please, I personally was fixated on the clean possibilities from lush, rich chords to Hollow bodyesque jazz lines, it’s spot on! Truly love this pick up system, I even made Bill late for his lesson haha thanks again guys really awesome stuff !
Matt Szlachta
As said, the whole experience was pure joy and Nu and Nexus assembles worked right out of the box.
Karl Steinberg
— Hello, I’ve just received the pickups, they are incredibly well built; very light weight too, stunning! I’m mounting them today and will report back soon.
For now I can’t stop looking at every single detail of the build quality, out of this world! 🙂
— Everything is very high quality in this kit, pickups, câbles, potentiometers, I’m very happy. I’m installing them in an Ibanez 8 string, they look neat with the black baseplate against the black finish of the guitar… Can’t wait to make some music! 🙂
— By the way, I forgot the most important: the pickups sound incredible!!!! Can’t stop playing! Clarity, dynamic, warmth, articulation; I’m very pleased! 🙂 Also, I’ve never heard so much details in my guitare tone, from the 24th fret of my e string to my low F# string, with a beautiful tone accros all the fingerboard. I was playing some Leo Brouwer with the Ibanez with the XRs this morning, incredible detailed sound, even with fast arpeggios and low A and E string to double the bass parts, finger style.
Pascal Vaucel
— Personally I love the look of the unadorned XR’s but to me a big part of it is perception of engineering design elegance. Yes, Joel, compliment intended.
— Joel, Number One XR6 and its two passive companions arrived today. I can’t express enough how pleased I am at the great engineering and manufacturing job you have done on these. First class all the way. What a great integration of the electronics and physical construction. I decided to build a new demo S-type guitar to put these in, instead of reshoeing one of my old horses. Parts are still winging their way to me. I will post pics when I get it together. I think you and some other folks will like it.
Charles Richardson
— Oooh the new miniature guitar pickups are here! So cute! Hopefully I’ll be using 6 of these on my new instrument to be completed late this year! Cycfi Research makes these cute little active pickups…. Open source project too!
— Seriously, they “Just worked” with the VG-99 and they sound FANTASTIC straight through amps.
Vance Galloway
— Just plugged in my new fully wired XR duo flex Jaguar w/ resonant filter for the first time and jammed for a couple hours. I’ve never played a better sounding guitar. These electronics are truly something else. Unquestionably a huge step up from the EMG 81/60 setup I used to use. Never heard anything like it. Incredible work guys!
— Just finished programming Bome MIDI translator to convert the midi data from the Nexus to control my Spicetone 6Appeal. Ultimately will be using a MIDI Solutions Event Processor for this job but for now the computer will do for testing purposes. The 3 CV knobs on my Jaguar are set to control for dry signal level, monophonic neck pickup (XR Duo Active) volume level, and overall level of the 7 distortion circuits, respectively. I now plan to add a couple more CV knobs and set them to control my H8000FW, which is placed next in the chain after 6Appeal and further processes all 8 (6 strings plus stereo outs at the end of the mono fx chain) signal paths simultaneously.
Happy to report everything is working flawlessly, exactly as I envisioned. The functionality and overall experience is amazing. To be frank, I feel like I just might have the single greatest, most powerful, technologically advanced guitar rig in the whole world, right here in my bedroom. In fact, I I feel rather confident about that. A million thanks to the 3 greatest guitar tech developers operating in the world today; Cycfi Research, Spicetone, and Eventide; for creating the tools that made this all possible. I salute you.
My Jag was loaded with XRs and a resonant filter for many months before the latest batch of Nu’s finally shipped and the Nexus was announced. They are the best sounding pickups ever. And my neck pickup slot is there either way so I saw no reason to remove the XR and leave it empty. This way I have the option of running completely separate monophonic and hexaphonic chains in parallel, which means i can still use all the mono fx gear i already have and blend it together with the hex stuff. If i wanted I could even have two monophonic paths, one from the XR and one from the sum of the Nu, and run each into parallel fx chains tailored specifically to complement the respective timbres of the different pickup positions…
In practice, the Nu does, amazingly (considering how different the tech is) sounds super close, almost the same as the XR, even in the bridge posittion. However, when blending them together with my CV knob, I can hear the XR in the neck adding a significant increase in sustain and heft/body/warmth to the tone that I definitely wouldn’t want to be without.
That neck XR is just something else… the best pickup of all time as far as i’m concerned.
— No doubt about it, the XR and Nu are awesome bass pickups. The 6Appeal is amazing for bass as well. This guitar sounds huuge!
Dylan Reznick
The Cycfi product range is beautifully inventive! Keep up the good work 🙂
Alan Ayoub
The hardware for my new bass has just been finished and now I made some tests with the Nu and I am STUNNED! It has such a clear nice character to its sound, truely inspiring! Brilliant work!!
Armin Metz
Besides all that, I wanted to tell you that I really love the way my guitar sounds now. These XR pickups are amazing sounding, and the ability to dial in the frequency and Q makes it so versatile. When I get some more money, I’m going to be setting up my other guitars with XRs as well (or maybe those new Modulos you’re working on if they’re ready). So keep up the good work!
John M
Piezo is fun for that acoustic type effect. But the Cycfi pickups have such a hifi extended response that they nail that anyway, without the sometimes unpopular ‘nastiness’ of piezos. I’ll have to see about it, but after I’ve tried Nu’s on a couple of guitars including an acoustic I doubt I’ll use piezos again.
Tom Winspear
The only magnetic pickups I would consider at this point are the Cycfi Research Nu Multi. The Roland, Antares, and Fishman pickups are only suited for MIDI guitar.
As far as Piezos go, RMC is the best for MIDI guitar, and it’s a toss-up between RMC, L.R.Baggs, Fishman, and Graph Tech for acoustic sound. They all sound brittle to me. The acoustic piezo sound has to be processed to sound decent; I use a Fishman Aura Spectrum DI with reasonable results. It still doesn’t sound like an acoustic guitar to me.
For individual string processing one would have to apply six filters before even thinking of other processes!
That leaves me with the clear winner: Nu Multi with Nexus!
Peter Knoot
These are the most exciting pickups on the market. I can’t wait to put them on my cello and run it through the Boss GP-10! You rawk Joel.
Clark Battle
Just outstanding!!! Are there awards for design and innovation in the guitar or music world? We seriously need to nominate Joel.
Steve Effren
I remember first hearing about these pickups with a clip of the Aura pickup they do. There was a demo clip with the signal EQd to be like an acoustic and it sounded incredible. I’ll definitely be looking for more from them.
Aidan Brock
Great sounding pickup !
Cobi Tanium
— Welcome to the future! Light as a feather, looks that will pop eyes out of their sockets, and sound? Well, we have the absolutely highest expectations! Joel over at Cycfi is pushing the envelope…
— The pickups sound great! Super separation and clarity without being too trebly.
— We fitted a couple of the amazingly lightweight, cool looking and well sounding Cycfi XR (eXtended Response) quad coil pickups (custom prototypes with angled coils) in one of our Boden 8s and brought in Per Nilsson (Scar Symmetry, Kaipa) to demonstrate for us. Guitar is tuned ECGCGCGC (high to low), which was a first for Per. Sound went straight into Positive Grid BIAS FX with no additional processing.
Ola Strandberg
Joel, the mad genius behind Cycfi Research Inc. is also using the same modular technology in these pickups to create hexaphonic (+ septaphonic and octaphonic) pickups with a separate output for each string, AND he’s able to do sustainers with that same tech as well. Yes, true polyphonic output and sustainers.
These “conventional” pickups he’s offering first are just a hint at the potential of this project.
Decibel Guitars
I love your design on the active pickups in general; the tone is really amazing and setting a new standard!
Adida John-Claude Nsoto
I think it’s a super project Never seen such a beautiful and so detailed design and a sound so perfect with single pickups.
Guilherme C. Rocha
— Works exactly as advertised. Pickups are extremely high quality. Please not the spacing of your strings and take care to adjust the pickup’s depth as the individual elements are very sensitive and crosstalk may occur if they’ re too close to adjacent strings.
Been waiting for a product like this for years and its perfect.
— I bought your neo 6 last year and just now finally got everything put together. Input into a tascam us-800 into a PREEMPT_RT linux kernel computer running jack and puredata and i was pretty much blown away with regards to how clean it sounded and the minimal crosstalk. I just wanted to say you’ve done a great thing, thank you.
Mitchell Dokken
Djowel this stuff is shaping up to be fantastic..amazing work!
Luca Franco
I can see this being the next big thing in the guitar world, kind of how the Axe-FX was when it first came around and look at it now.
