Finding the ultimate tone is a constant struggle for many advanced guitarists. Most of the time, you’ll end up having to experiment with a variety of guitars, amps, picks, string gauges, pickups and other gear before unearthing the perfect sound you’ve been looking for. The Game Changer puts an end to the torture.
Created by Music Man, the guitar comes with clever circuitry that allows the user to switch to over 250,000 pickup combinations, creating over 8.5 million tonal possibilities for your instrument. Basically, it’s like having your guitar rewired on the fly — all without having to open up the instrument and messing with the onboard electrics.
The Game Changer looks no different than a regular guitar, sporting 37.75 x 12.9 x 1.75 inch dimensions. Body is made from chambered basswood with maple top, finished in high gloss polyester, with the neck fashioned from select maple and rosewood. For customizing, it has a five-way pickup selector and a toggle switch on the upper horn that can be assigned any of the available coil combinations (series, parallel, in-phase and out-of-phase are all onboard), allowing you to switch tones with a turn of the knob. There’s a push-pull pot on the tone control that switches between banks A and B, as well as a toggle switch offering another 15 banks of preset tones.
Three AA batteries are required, which can last the guitar for up to 100 hours of play. A dedicated software that offers a huge library of presets is included, which you can access by connecting the guitar to a PC via USB cable (there’s a port along the edge of the body).
The first production models of the Game Changer guitar will be available in the third quarter of the year. It will come in twin humbucker or humbucker-single-humbucker coil configurations, with either a hardtail or tremelo bridge. Price starts at $3,250.