Imagine being able to flick a switch on your guitar and your bottom 2 strings become a Bass, well Andy Alt’s new invention A Little Thunder is a very clever new Humbucker design that does just that! I’ve chatted to Andy many times over the years (check out my interview with Andy for The Guitar Noize Podcast), he previously told me about his invention but I didn’t understand how it worked, he has obviously fine tuned this pickup for years and finally has a pretty remarkable prototype that does something that no other pickup on the market does. Just check out the video above to hear how it can be used in different situations an genres. Andy Alt used to play in a duo called ‘Swimming In Trees’ alongside a drummer and I think this is where the idea started to come to fruition, as a singer songwriter Andy was able to add a bass line to fatten up the sound of his guitar and make the duo sound like a trio.
The addition of the bass feature comes at no physical modifications to your beloved guitar: no drilling, routing, adding extra strings even replacing 9V batteries or using midi. Players will simply remove their existing humbucker and with about 5 minutes of installation time, will have the ability to push a button and add bass to their lowest notes, leaving all 6 guitar strings in-tact. The controls for the pickup are on-board a custom designed pickup ring: an on/off switch, a -1 or -2 octave switch and a polyphonic (2 bass notes at once) or “low note priority mode” (detects the lowest note being played an only applies the effect to that note).
Head over to the A Little Thunder Kickstarter page for a more detailed explanation of the technology used in this pickup and to contribute.