Seymour Duncan HyperSwitch

[Will Chen]

I have plenty of 30 + year old guitars. That wouldn’t stop me from using this though but the thing that would it is a stupid idea.

That you've owned for 30 years? Cool, you're an exception. Been playing 38 and my only "old" guitar is from the mid 90's. And it's been beat to sh!t and modded into oblivion.

 

[State of Epicicity]

How would you connect this to a PC?

You'd just use Bluetooth.

 

[Eagle]

That you've owned for 30 years? Cool, you're an exception. Been playing 38 and my only "old" guitar is from the mid 90's. And it's been beat to sh!t and modded into oblivion.

No not all me . About 15 years is the most. I have a lot of guitars though and play hundreds.

 

[ChangelingIX]

In the manual there is a warning that the switch will not change pickup selections when the charge drains enough, and the guitar will make no sound at all if it drains enough after that. Anyone using EMGs has in mind that the battery is essential, but those pickups take a long time to drain enough of the battery to degraded the tone. In this context I'm not at all into the idea of the switch being so dependant on the battery. I assumed if the battery were not in at all it would still work in the last way it was programmed (like maybe a watch battery would take over and maintain memory, or something like that). Knowing this, I have to echo the OP, and I just start to think of this as a point of failure only. I guess if the app lets you know battery status and warns you when to change, that's one thing. But you guys are also right that apps don't necessarily stay updated, usable, or even available, so this does not seem as future proof as it could be.

I think a good alternative is really to route and install enough physical switches to allow for every variation. Pain in the ass to navigate, but it would work in a future proof way. Binary tree switching can get you there too if you want to remove the pickup selector.

Awesome Guitars has solderless PCBs and pickguards for that, but I think even their implementation would be better if they integrated blade pickup selectors rather than just a row of mini switches. I prefer a blade selector plus mini switches for variety of I'm going that route.

I initially thought the same thing (about just having more switches for variations, like I used to have in the old days), but given just how many variations this Hyperswitch provides I don't think you could come close to it with mini-toggles....though it's pretty funny to picture a guitar with like five dozen mini-toggles on it haha. Plus part of what I like about this thing is that you can assign the settings to whatever toggle position you want. Plus this thing also lets you bypass the tone control, change capacitors, etc. I tend to generally be one of those guys who thinks that I can get the tones I need from one switch and maybe some push/pull pots, so I get it, but then there's another part of me that's like, "Well, I spent the money on these pickups and this guitar so if there's a simple way to get more tones out of them than I already am, maybe I should?" So yeah, this thing definitely intrigues me...

 

[Eagle]

I initially thought the same thing (about just having more switches for variations, like I used to have in the old days), but given just how many variations this Hyperswitch provides I don't think you could come close to it with mini-toggles....though it's pretty funny to picture a guitar with like five dozen mini-toggles on it haha. Plus part of what I like about this thing is that you can assign the settings to whatever toggle position you want. Plus this thing also lets you bypass the tone control, change capacitors, etc. I tend to generally be one of those guys who thinks that I can get the tones I need from one switch and maybe some push/pull pots, so I get it, but then there's another part of me that's like, "Well, I spent the money on these pickups and this guitar so if there's a simple way to get more tones out of them than I already am, maybe I should?" So yeah, this thing definitely intrigues me...

And what makes you think that the signal is not going to be detrimentally affected by the operation and components in the switch. I can hear the difference between different capacitors fairly easily and this is a major interference in the signal. It adds a ton of worse options at the probable expense of the 5 best tones .

 

[mavrick102000]

It's a solution looking for a problem.

I also don't get why gear developers insist on mobile apps only approach. You can easily develop cross-platform apps that work on the computer as well and this type of software really does not need to be 100% native code for performance.

Mobile is always at the risk of being delisted from app stores for whatever reasons, or becoming non-working because of an OS update. Computer software not so much, so 20 years from now you could still use this at least on your computer.

Companies/Corporations want all of your data as close to all the time as possible. Even if they don't use it, they can resell it.

From an IoT perspective, it always sounds interesting, but it's the "value proposition" that you're not told about that's driving the "why" - no thanks.