UK-based company Submarine was founded by musician and engineer Pete Roe, and after a few other successful pickup releases, they have now unleashed a hexaphonic pickup, the Subsix. As you might gather from the name, a hexaphonic pickup is one that isolates the signal from each individual string, allowing you to experiment with the sound in truly innovative and potentially oddball ways. The pickup is passive, meaning no batteries are needed, and installation is a breeze. Once it's installed, you can plug it into an audio interface, mixer, pedals, and/or amps.
The pickup has a die-cast body and is chrome-plated, sliding under the strings without the need for any drilling or soldering. While it’s simple to install, I recommend watching the instructional video on their website instead of trying to figure it out yourself. As someone who’s not mechanically adept in the slightest, I was able to mount it to my acoustic and electric guitar quite easily. One thing to note is that you might have trouble sliding it under the strings if your action is low, so it’s a good idea to review the pickup specifications on the website to ensure it will fit your instrument. Once I fitted it under the strings of a guitar with slightly higher action, I was able to quickly adjust the pickup height, and everything worked perfectly.
The pickup has two minijack outputs, each connecting to a custom cable with three audio channels that can go into a mixer, audio interface, pedals, or really anything that can take at least six inputs. Once you are plugged in, the six microminiature copper coils allow you to isolate your individual guitar strings, which is where all the fun happens.
Submarine offers some suggestions on ways to use the hexaphonic pickup, and for me, the best starting point was simply to play around with EQ and panning on all the strings. Plugging into a mixer with headphones, it was easy to find what frequencies could use adjusting and then pan the strings to get a panoramic stereo sound. When using distortion or fuzz, being able to adjust the EQ by string can also be handy to either tighten up the sound or make things even fuzzier.
Running the pickup through octave and modulation effects is also a cool way to enhance, freshen, or warp your sound. I ran it through a sub-octave pedal where it was only hitting the low E string. While playing chords might be a bit too much, using the low string as a bass string while keeping the other strings in normal pitch was fun and a cool way to open up some new possibilities.
The manufacturer also suggests trying it with delay and modulation pedals, which I did, and again, it was easy to find a lot of great and interesting sounds out of it. Hooking up a flanger or phaser pedal to the pickup and then picking which string would get all warbly, while also adjusting the EQ and panning, created a lot of intriguing and unusual sounds that would be perfect for the experimental-minded.
For studio engineers, the ability to separate out the strings could inspire a lot of new ideas as well as make some editing and fixes easier. I am not much of a home recorder, so I didn’t test it out in a recording setting, but based on how easy it was to use in a live setting, it should also be a snap to use in a studio setting. Various old reggae/dub engineers used to separate out the strings for different mixing, and that process must have been extremely complicated, while Submarine figured out a simple solution for the plug-and-play folks.
Extremely well-designed and easy to use, Submarine’s latest pickup is a great tool to inspire new ideas and find unique sounds. The possibilities seem limitless, and you don’t have to be a mad scientist to figure it out. Regardless of one’s technical expertise, one should be able to find awesome and creative uses for it after a few minutes. Besides the benefits of having complete control of your instrument, it’s also a very fun tool that will encourage musical exploration.
Price: $303

submarinepickup.com