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Emg Battery Saver


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Hey guys I had an idea. Usually to save your battery life people unplug the cable from the jack when they have EMGs. I had an idea after working on my pickup winder. Instead of unpluggin you could just have a switch that goes from the battery to the input jack and whenever you are using it, just flip the switch and the battery wouldnt be drained of life I dont think. If any smarter people in electronics (ansil, lovekraft, and others) know this wont work or it will work let me know.

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The output jack is a stereo jack wired up to disconnect the negative part of the battery when there's no plug inserted. It's basically a switch in it self. Stompboxes like Boss ones do the same thing with the input jack because the switching system is active, so even on bypass mode, it's using some juice.

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The idea is sound, but not strictly useful. How often do you find yourself in a situation where you don't need to play, but unplugging is simply out of the question?

If you have trouble with your battery dying too quickly, I'm pretty sure wiring two (or more) 9V batteries in parallel will give you results.

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Hey guys I had an idea. Usually to save your battery life people unplug the cable from the jack when they have EMGs. I had an idea after working on my pickup winder. Instead of unpluggin you could just have a switch that goes from the battery to the input jack and whenever you are using it, just flip the switch and the battery wouldnt be drained of life I dont think. If any smarter people in electronics (ansil, lovekraft, and others) know this wont work or it will work let me know.

i actually had an idea similar to this, but it included switching the battery off and switching to a passive neck pickup (at the time i didnt have the money to buy 2 emgs). you would have the emg and passive going to a switch, and have the battery wire going to another switch. you would then wire the battery connector in and wire in a jack. you would have to mount the switches real close to each other so you could switch them fast. i think that would work

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I've done this on a couple of my guitars. I use one pole of the switch to break the battery connection and the other to short the output to ground - resulting in a battery kill and signal kill switch.

The main reason I like to have one is because I use the sustainiac. With that, there is a special guitar plug that is tied to the cable at the end of the neck. It's just a lot easier for me to leave the cable in rather than mess with it every time I play. I don't know if I'd use it as much with a normal setup.

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I have a bass with active pickups and a power on/off switch on the face of the guitar. What I don't like about it is that if I forget to turn it off or it somehow unintentionally gets turned on, the battery is dead the next day... :D

I like the stereo jack switching scheme better.

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unless you have your guitar loaded with tons of stuff sucking the juice......is it really a problem? i have guitars with emgs in them and rarely have to replace the batteries(4-5 months), and i play alot too. and i sure have never had the batteries totally fart out on me.

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back to the killswitch, how would you build a simple killswitch like the one that bloke from radiohead has. Is it just a SPDT switch with the first connection away from the pickups, the second one coming from the pickups and the last connection to ground. I magine this crude diagram below as the underside of a SPDT switch.

| o-|------<pickups

| o-|------>tone pot or selector switch

| o-|-------- ground

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Easiest, simplest killswitch simply shorts the output to ground, like this:

| o-|------>N/C

| o-|------>output

| o-|------>ground

Anything more is overkill. This has been discussed to death on several previous occasions.

BTW, has anybody considered that power switching is likely to cause loud clicks or pops that could destroy your speakers at higher volumes? :D

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I don't normally use the switch with anything powered up. I have wanted to do a momentary switch for a while now. I just haven't had a chance to find an appropriate switch and guitar to try it out on.

Not to sidetrack too much here but does anyone know if Randy Rhoads had anything fancier than a momentary switch wired in (ala Tribute CD)? Is it just the construction of the momentary switches that keep things from popping or did he have something to suppress those clicks/pops? Would a debounce circuit be of any use in an application like this?

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hmm theres a nice project involving a gold supercap a couple of transistors a regulator that gives you 9v of power very low ma but you could recharge the guitar in 20 seconds. 9@1A perhaps a better alternative to batteries and disconecting.

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Signal switching shouldn't cause pops because there's no DC level change - power switching is likely to induce transients as the caps discharge through the output.

AFAIK, Randy used the old trick of turning the neck pickup all the way down and using the selector switch to cut the signal - again, no DC, no pops.

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hey lk you round man i am in chat at DIY

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Wouldn't Randy Rhoads have just used his Les Paul (or dual volume/tone Jackson V) and its standard 3-way selector with one of the pickups turned all the way down? Or did he have a special kill switch on his guitars?

Tom Morello's kill switch is a Les Paul style 3-way toggle that's wired up so the signal is ON on both sides of the switch, but OFF in the middle. That's how he gets those cool fluttery gate effects. He can just flick it back and forth really quickly and get super-fast stutters happening.

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