Hi this is Barry, EveryTone's founder here with my first ever blog. My oh my, what an adventure it has been getting EveryTone started from an idea and a few conversations over 3 years ago, to where we are now.
Where do I begin? Well like you, I'm a mad keen guitarist, I've been performing since my early teens; never had the "cahonies" to try to make a living at it, but have the greatest respect and admiration (plus a wee bit of envy) for those that do, but early on, I got the 'tone bug'. Like you, I became obsessed with my tone, and not knowing what I should/would/might end up playing, I always wanted to hedge my bets versatility wise. I wanted to find a guitar that was great to play, but could sound like anything I wanted, so I could play in any style and emulate any of my heroes: The "universal guitar", a fantasy!
Now I had/have a background in electronics and IT so I always knew when some of the claims that were made about guitars, amps, effects etc, were not based on "sound principles" (pun intended). After all, an electric guitar obeys the laws of physics, there's no magic or woo-hoo, but I accept that the aesthetics of tone is a somewhat subjective area , perception being a big part of reality (although there are musicologists would would argue that point too).
Anyway, on my journey "in search of the perfect tone (or range of tones)", I acquired a "Red Special" the guitar designed by Dr Brian May of Queen. Very influenced by the Fender Strat, one big difference being the electrics for the 3 single coil pickups. Rather than Fender's 3-way or 5-way selector, the Red Special has 6 single-pole single-throw switches, on/off, and polarity reverse per coil. So one could do things like P1+P2+P3 or P1-P3 or P1+P2-P3 etc. Well apart from the fact I hated the original Burns built pickups (thin yet muddy) I was intrigued by the phase polarity switches. I soon came to the view that two single coil pickups out of phase, sound, well, just not very good at all, really quite thin and tinny, but, if one put a 3rd pickup into the mix, it would start to sound cool again. But even that wasn't very far reaching. Once you noticed that phase polarity is relative, i.e. that -P1 + P2 + P3 , sounds exactly the same as +P1 -P2 -P3... so there weren't really as many options as the 6 switches suggest: P1+P2-P3, P1-P2+P3, & P-P2-P3 OK you also have the 3 PU's alone, and in phase pairs, P1+P2, P1+P3, P2+P3 , and out-of-phase pairs P1-P2, P2-P3, P1-P3 (poor sounding, not useful at all for me) but you did have 9 usable settings which is 4 more than your average axe. And moving between them , mid performance was a tiny bit hit and miss, depending where you were and where you wanted to go. Also you still had to go with that guitar; maybe you didn't like it for other reasons, the neck is quite thin and particular, and even with the wider than average range of settings it still sounded limiting somehow, great for hard rock/pop but, blues, jazz, country?!
Next I tried swapping out the pickups for a range of after-market upgrades, I put a Tele PU in the Neck, a Strat PU in the Mid and a hot Humbucker in the Bridge. That improved matters but it's still just a curiosity I only take occasionally to a jam session, I would never use it with my band for a 3 hour show. But it got me thinking about the other limitations that I, along with every other gigging guitarist ,had, and up till now has had to live with, and I've also thought that , "one person's problem is another person's opportunity" could be applied here, and so the EveryTone concept started to germinate in my noggin.
I thought, if "1 pickup against 1 pickup" was 180 degrees out of phase, could we think of 2 against 1 as 120 degrees out of phase? And wouldn't if be cool if there was a circuit that would vary the phase up to 180 in fine enough steps as to produce lotsa tones 'in between'. And if we could vary the phase between pickups why not vary the gain too? So I came up with the circuitry that we've built into EveryTone. A full featured multi-channel mixer for guitar pickup coils. But how can you control such a mixer if it's insider your guitar!?, mixers need a whole load of knobs and faders, it'll never fit.. More on this later...