Official Luthiers Forum!

Have any of you looked into the 8-way Seattle Super Switch that Neil Brown has been developing?

https://www.seattlesuperswitch.com/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/seattle-super-switch-8-way-tone-shifter#/

Its still in the crowd-funding stage, but I love that its a new idea for guitar tones. It seems so many of us are focused on "how they used to do it"—vintage spec—etc. This looks like a pretty interesting idea for accessing more pickup combinations in a 3-pickup guitar.

In Episode 48 of the Fret Files (Eric Daw's guitar focused pod cast, http://www.fretfiles.com/) - Eric talks with Neil about the switch and how he came up with it. The delay in their connection during that interview makes the conversation sound a little more strained that it would normally be - but good stuff.

I'm feeling compelled to order one, to help fund it, in no small part because I love the idea of trying to bring something new to the Strat word.

I was wondering how there could be 8 combinations with three pickups until I saw that he counts all pickups off as one position. The design feature that allows the switch to be used either as a blade switch or as a rotary switch is pretty cool, although it appears from the size of the box that the rotary mode wouldn't be physically compatible with most solid body guitars with three pickups like an LP or SG. The guitar shown in the video as example of the rotary application is a semi-hollow body. It is slick though to be able to just drop a switch like this into a Strat.

I wonder how it well it would work in practice to have 8 detent positions in the space of the usual 5. One thing I like about 5-way blade switches is that you can tell at a glance which pickup or pickup combo is selected. I would think that might be not so easy with 8 positions. The description of the switch doesn't say how the different pickup combinations are distributed among the 8 positions.

The line "It's a creation born out of the unique fusion of Airplane manufacturing, coffee roasting, and music." in the fund raising description cracked me up.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

I ordered one up as I am curious.

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