Silly question on stereo guitars

I'm not sure about "stereo", but I remember, many years ago, witnessing a man playing a split pickup Gretsch White Falcon. He was able to put the lower 3 strings through one amp and the top three through another - thereby giving different tone to each set.

I don't call that stereo and I can only imagine that it could be to give a spatial effect to the playing.

There was also a guitar made for EVH which had a six piece piezo saddle (and I think) a tiny little stereo mixer for the six individual signals. It was an acoustic if I remember. Synth guitars usually have individual pickups for each string too.

But this guitar was made so the six strings could be panned to form a wide stereo image from one side of the stage to the other. Pretty neat concept except, actual real guitars don't sound quite like that - I mean with the high E string all the way on stage left and the low E on the other side. Acoustic guitars are stereo in away because sound comes out from different parts of them - even the neck. Guys use 2 mics to pick up that 'image' for recordings and such.

But having it that spread out...I don't think it would sound like that even if you were sitting *inside* the guitar, lol.

Most guitars nowadays that are 'stereo' are more or less what they call "dual-mono" meaning each pickup has it's own output. It's mostly for sending each pickup's output to a separate amp and having different settings on each amp so it sounds like two guitars playing in unison. Thing is, it sometimes doesn't sound like 2 guitars playing because the signal is *exactly* in unison; you could get the same sound with a totally mono guitar, using a Y cable and sending it through 2 different amps. The trick is to add a little time-delay in one of the signals so that the signal from one pickup gets to its amp just a tiny bit behind the other; that's where it starts to really sound 'stereo' but it's more like 'ganged-stereo' where a mono signal is processed with time-delay (like in some digital reverbs), and then the whole 'image' is send out through two outputs to the mixer.

It's a cool concept. I had a Rickenbacker 4001 with 2 outputs (Rick O Sound) and that was basically splitting the pickups. I have a Carvin AE185 which splits the piezo from the mag pickups, and though I hardly ever use it that way (like once), it's kind of a neat thing to have in the back of your mind that you *could* one day use two amps.

Best

ah.. it was actually the ricky that i was thinkin of when i posted this... just sparked my curiosity.