Coil Guitars

[cgarlie-fgn]

About a week ago, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours at the "labs" of Coil Guitars (really a lab in the Engineering department at the University of Maryland). Coil is a line of guitars designed by University of Maryland computer engineering professor Bruce Jacob. The guitars have three electronic innovations (which can be purchased separately and installed in any guitar) --

>> A "crossbar" switching design which can be set up (via jumpers) to provide 15 tone combinations (using a 5 and 3 way switch combination). The Coil guitars use two tapped humbuckers which can be configured in single pickup or humbucker combinations. So (for example), the five way switch would choose the pickup combination and then the three way could select (say) whether they were in series, parallel, or out of phase.

>> Switching between single coil and humbucker pups can cause volume issues (especially with out of phase setting) that can be a problem doing live performances, so Bruce and his team (mostly university grad students with an interest in guitar) have created circuits (called "Level Headed") that allow you to balance the volume settings.

>> They have also created a set of tone controls (called Qtone and Qfreq) which allow you to set the center frequencies and bandwidth of the tone filters (instead of just rolling off the top end with a treble control).

I have attached a short article from the university engineering newsletter about the project. Check them out and check out their web site at http://www.coil-guitars.com/

Charlie