Optical Pick Ups.

[vomitHatSteve]

If you wanna do cool things with light interference and individual string detection, this seems like a cool idea.

back in the early 70's Ovaion had one of their guitars a stereo guitar but the way they did it was to send every other string right or left.
So the E, G, and A strings went right and the B, D and big E went left.

Sent to 2 amps it sounded freakin' AMAZING!!!! Fingerpicking sounded like you were two guitarists.
i've never forgotten that sound even though it clearly didn't make any waves.
I've never seen it anywhere else although I'm sure it exists.
But it really was an amazing sound.

At winter NAMM a few years back, one of the vendors was demoing something called the Buitar and the Baitar, which were 6 strings with the low E and low E+A string down an octave and routed through a different pickup. It was pretty cool.
I think same as with these optical pickups, there are some niche applications where a few artists will see interesting potential from these tools, but they'll mostly remain pretty obscure.

[rayc]

Stereo amps/guitars were cool but that sort of thing that doesn't kick on for long - the 0s should have been its launch pad but stereo pedals were the rage instead. The Ovation was cutting edge as was their fibre glass backed acoustic with built in pick up...sadly the production quality hadn't quite caught up with the innovation when m friend bought one in 78: the back peeled off within 6 months. Mind you I have NO IDEA how he could afford one in his final year of teachers college.