Add a Little Thunder to Your Guitar – A Pickup that Adds Bass Notes

Ever wished you could have a bass player that you could turn on and off with a switch? One that would follow your playing closely and never show up late to practice? One that could fit INSIDE YOUR GUITAR?!??!

Well, the future is now. A Little Thunder is a pickup that allows you to add octave down notes to just the bottom two strings of your guitar. This means that you can add walking basslines to your chord solos without adding octaves to ALL the strings. You can have the range of an 8 string on 6 strings (kinda). Tracking demos on the fly? No need to have a separate bass to lay down a quick bass groove.

A Little Thunder is currently in the Kickstarter phase of it’s existence, which means it is being held hostage by genius/madman creator Andy Alt (online marketing director for Steve Vai) for the sum of $35,000, of which he has raised around $21,000. Some of the rewards include guitar lessons with Gretchen Menn (of Zepparella), Daniele Gottardo, Pete Thorn, and lunch with legendary guitar tech Thomas Nordegg.

The pickup uses DSP and other black magic to track your playing and add the bass notes before the signal leaves your guitar, so you don’t have any external chachkies to haul around. There’s a switch on the pickup ring that turns it on and off and can do one or two octaves down. The pickup is charged by USB which gets you 6 hours of use on a single charge.

Check out this informative video to get the full story straight from the creator himself (bonus: footage of Thomas Pridgen obliterating some beats):