Thank you, Andi!

Been thinking about this some more.

If I had a gadget that could, without affecting it, "copy" and then phase invert some signal from the bass side and sum it with the treble side, should that remove the crosstalk?

If that's the case, does such a gadget exist already or shall I continue my investigations into making one?

Does that imply that the mild steel 'shield' either didn't work, or wasn't practical?

It's basically how active noise cancelling in headphones, etc work - it's basically common mode rejection


There could be some substantial difficulties
One problem is the interior strings will cross talk, but the outer strings wont (or will be far lower in level) so if one just grabs the signal from the opposite-side pickup to make that secondary signal you could actually introduce cross talk from the outer strings (since a compliment wont exist in the primary signal)
you could try to filter ("EQ") the phase inverted signal you are injecting to attenuate how much of the outer strings are present...though that's always imperfect (we aren't just dealing with sine fundamentals & if you play higher up, you might run outside the filter)

something with flexible routing like the AXE FX should allow you to configure that (MAYBE something like the K-mix could do it..not sure if you can split, invert and then run to a bus on that ) but you'll be burning some blocks

It'd be an interesting exercise...I'd definitely suggest doing it in SW before going down the HW route


individual string pickups could probably be helpful BUT that's a bit of engineering and the ones currently available seem to be all guitar spacing
and it's a big bite of development
ditto for optical pickups
I have talked to a stickickist who had RMC saddles back in the day, but were removed under the advice of MR Chapman due to the non adjustability..and of course you are probably going to get a substaintially different tone

Hi David - the shield definitely has a positive effect but it's not total (yet!) I need to play with it more.

Begin Again,

Thank you! Very interesting and makes a lot of sense - I'd just end up adding more bass into the treble side.

I'll just stick with the steel shield and eq methods for the time being.