New Guitar Pickup, The Submarine, Successfully Funded

The Submarine, a new guitar pickup, launched on European crowdfunding platform Ulule.com and hit its fundraising target with a full week to spare. The Submarine is now confirmed to go into production. It is still possible to pre-order a Submarine before the campaign finishes this Friday. 

A stretch target of £20,000 has been made. If this goal is reached, the packaging for the Submarine will be upgraded to an embossed linen carry case and will also include an attachment kit making it possible to fit even more guitars.

Designed and developed by critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter Pete Roe, (former stalwart of Laura Marling’s band), Roe saw pre-orders for The Submarine pour in from all over Europe and his early bird discounts sold out within an hour of launch, leaving Roe “elated and grateful for such overwhelming support.”

As a result, Guitarist, AskAudio, Music Radar, Total Guitar, Guitarplayer and Songwriting magazines picked up the story, and The Submarine’s HQ email has been overloaded with enquiries.

Earlier in the year, The Submarine’s production prototypes were quickly snapped up by artists such as Bon Iver, Royal Blood and, of course, Laura Marling who also offers support for Roe’s campaign by appearing in his crowdfunding video.

The Submarine fits most acoustic and electric guitars and is held in place by a new nano-material suction pad similar to gecko’s feet. It requires no alteration and causes no damage to the guitar. The signal it picks up from two strings gives a second output to the guitar, to which various effects can then be applied.

This opens up an exciting new set of previously impossible guitar sounds and techniques. Alongside adding octave bass to the low strings, it is now possible to add overdrive, delay or atmospheric effects to the two high strings. 

Roe has toured with Mumford and Sons, Ben Howard, Lucy Rose, and Willy Mason, to name but a few and chose the life of a professional musician when he walked out of his Mechanical Engineering degree final exam, so he wouldn’t miss an important rehearsal. But his love of engineering remained, and proved invaluable ten years down the road.  

In fact, the road is where The Submarine was born. During a long tour with a band that had only one space on board for Roe on their bus, he could not bring along his bassist. Being stuck without the sound to convey his songs the way they were intended, Roe experimented with various effects pedals and finally made his own one string pickups in dingy dressing rooms and budget hotels. Used with an octave pedal, Pete found his homemade pickup could give the effect of a bass guitar accompaniment. The first prototypes paved the way for further development and, two years of hard work later, this first concept resulted in The Submarine. Roe is a ‘one man band’ entrepreneur who has created a pickup that allows musicians to be a one man band on the road. 

The Submarine crowdfunding campaign was originally featured on AskAudio here.

Pete gave two special Glastonbury Festival showcase performances with the Submarine as well as interviews to the BBC and Worthy FM. 

BOSS UK featured the Submarine being used with a selection of their pedals on their facebook page.

The Submarine will continue to raise essential funds on European crowdfunding platform Ulule until 24 July 2015.

Link to the Ulule campaign:

www.submarinepickup.com/crowdfunding

Further information and demo videos can be found at www.submarinepickup.com