A Noobs Sustainer

[ArMelvin1]

Ok I'm new and this is my first post on the site. Which by the way I love, i found it about a year ago and have used this forum and the accompanying tutorials and references and supply sections in all of my builds. I realize how long the sustainer thread is, and I also realize the issues surrounding it, not just the functional issues but also the dead thread and locked threads and the disappearances of many of the posts i read with such interest. I just wanted to add my findings and because the pinned topic is closed to me I'm posting here however right as i'm writing this i realize i should have posted on one of the other topics that have sprang up I'm sorry to whom it may concern. Anyway here we go.

As of the past ten minutes i have had one note on my guitar sustaining. Right now i have no pics or videos to share as proof but i will when I can. Anyways i made the 'standard' driver wrapping 30AWG wire from the Shack on an old thin bobbin and affixed a magnet to it as for my amp/pre-amp i will honestly say I had no idea what I'm doing there. I tried making the Fetzer/Ruby and several others none with success, so in desperation and an astounding step of luck I used an on board effect i bought on Ebay from guitarfetish its the mini tube driver originally meant to power a small on board speaker so i thought why not after all the driver is essentially a speaker minus the cone right? And lo and behold IT WORKED!!!

I'm not an electronics geek i have never used a soldering iron until i started fiddling with guitars. My experiment amazes me it sustains with no buzz no squealing provided its shielded from the other pickups, it works on all strings! i thought was impressive because I've read posts of others troubles with the high e and b strings. So far it is not hard mounted in the guitar, and i haven't tried switching leads to try the other harmonic mode but i just wanted to post this in case this is new, I'm not lazy it's just there are 316 pages in the big thread and i haven't gotten through them yet.

So thank you everyone for reading and please post and tell me what you think. oh and Hello! lol

[elmo7sharp9]

So thank you everyone for reading and please post and tell me what you think. oh and Hello! lol

Congratulations!

Hope you've got a use for notes that last forever!

I think you are tremendously lucky in getting good first time results.

But bear in mind - you've also put in some study and effort to wind an effective driver coil.

Can you post a link to the guitarfetish product you're using?

I think you may be on to something here.

I enjoy building electronic circuits from components and have the experience to do it well,

but I'm probably in the minority on Project Guitar.

Construction of electronic circuits is a major barrier to most would-be DIY Sustainer users.

The results vary considerably, even amongst experimenters following the same design.

If you've found a readily-available drop-in circuit, that fits on board the guitar

then it's a giant leap forward for electronics-shy folk who aren't afraid of winding a couple of hundred turns of wire

(which is the easy part).

Out of curiosity...

Any idea of how many turns of 30AWG wire you wound on to your bobbin?

What string gauges/scale length are you using on the guitar?

What model of pickup are you using for the source signal?

How far is the centre of the driver from the 1st-string saddle?

[ArMelvin1]

So thank you everyone for reading and please post and tell me what you think. oh and Hello! lol

Congratulations!

Hope you've got a use for notes that last forever!

I think you are tremendously lucky in getting good first time results.

But bear in mind - you've also put in some study and effort to wind an effective driver coil.

Can you post a link to the guitarfetish product you're using?

I think you may be on to something here.

I enjoy building electronic circuits from components and have the experience to do it well,

but I'm probably in the minority on Project Guitar.

Construction of electronic circuits is a major barrier to most would-be DIY Sustainer users.

The results vary considerably, even amongst experimenters following the same design.

If you've found a readily-available drop-in circuit, that fits on board the guitar

then it's a giant leap forward for electronics-shy folk who aren't afraid of winding a couple of hundred turns of wire

(which is the easy part).

Out of curiosity...

Any idea of how many turns of 30AWG wire you wound on to your bobbin?

What string gauges/scale length are you using on the guitar?

What model of pickup are you using for the source signal?

How far is the centre of the driver from the 1st-string saddle?

well unfortunately I still haven't gotten pics online yet but the guitar I'm using is a generic guitar i bought on Ebay a while back, funny how it all goes back to evil bay? Anyways the scale is 25.5" with 24 frets maple neck curly maple top and i believe a basswood back, the source pickup is a no-name generic humbucker that reads about 9ohms, sadly i have yet to find guitar fetish on Ebay again I sincerely hope the store is there somewhere. The drop in board was simply called a Mini Tube Amp it has an op-amp attached which i think would be better replaced with an lm 386 haven't tried yet i have just been too excited to take it apart I'll try and get a reading on the coil once i take it apart to permanently install it. But my little electronics knowledge is telling me its less than 8 ohms, I'm also going to experiment with a dual coil setup to see if it helps, it seems it takes a couple seconds for it to sustain a note for example if you are holding a note and slide forward. . . . . i'll try and get a vid on you tube soon. Thank you too by the way for responding.

[WezV]

the bold in the posts confuses me :?

i saw guitar fetish and had a look at the website - guess its this one

http://store.guitarfetish.com/on25waguamdr.html

looks fun

all of which i managed to do without highlighting pointless words in bold... seriously - whats that about? are punctuation and explanation marks not enough??? (not that i claim to use those things well)

[ArMelvin1]

the bold in the posts confuses me :?

i saw guitar fetish and had a look at the website - guess its this one

http://store.guitarfetish.com/on25waguamdr.html

looks fun

all of which i managed to do without highlighting pointless words in bold... seriously - whats that about? are punctuation and explanation marks not enough??? (not that i claim to use those things well)

Yep that's the one just wired everything like normal

used little jumpers from the source pickup signal on the guitar's switch and one to the casing for ground and the driver i connected to the speaker - and +

[elmo7sharp9]

2.5 watts is more than enough!

Looks like we've found a winner.

the bold in the posts confuses me :?

all of which i managed to do without highlighting pointless words in bold... seriously - whats that about? are punctuation and explanation marks not enough??? (not that i claim to use those things well)

Hey, Wez...

I'm used to I.T. report writing with a lot of keywords in bold.

It's become my personal style, I'm not about to change...

I used it, here, to point out that this gadget could be a shortcut to a working sustainer for a lot of folk.

It could be the solution to a long-standing barrier to DIY sustainer success.

[WezV]

I do understand the use of bold to highlight key points, and i know i am being picky here... but the use of bold can also confuse if not used carefully. When reading your post i found the extra emphasis was throwing off the flow of the sentence for me as a drunken friday night reader

[elmo7sharp9]

I do understand the use of bold to highlight key points, and i know i am being picky here... but the use of bold can also confuse if not used carefully. When reading your post i found the extra emphasis was throwing off the flow of the sentence for me as a drunken friday night reader

In similar drunken situations,

I find that closing one eye aids comprehension

and, curiously, helps slide-guitar intonation by cutting out unnecessary 3D information.

Closing both eyes is best - the trouble disappears completely!

[space_ryerson]

Interesting. I'm glad that it works for you! Out of curiosity, what chip(s) are on the board for this amp?

[ArMelvin1]

the coil measures at seven ohms and the chip is a 2073

[psw]

Thanks for sharing...

I bought this and put it forward as having some potential at some point in the thread. There's a good little LM386 with preamp kit in canada from hobbytron also that I mentioned to that had potential (but would not sell outside canada or the usa for me to test it). Again, just about any amp will work if the coil is suitable which has always been my contention.

I didn't do much with this kit, mine at least had the on/off switch in the pot, that I assume yours does, and it didn't lend itself easily to the kinds of installations that I do which require a bit of bypass switching to deal with more than just a bridge pickup...but it certainly did work as did many other designs for circuits offered by many. By the time I got this one though I had already refined my own circuits cheaper and easier for my purposes and the project generally, I had some concerns that there may be loading issues, good to hear if there are not changes in guitar tone with the circuit in play as this is not really desirable.

I looked into the source kits from artec as well for other versions. Cruising around electronics sites will often provide good kits of various types, as I have mentioned many times, all my early work was done with slight mods to the CHAmp and PreCHAmp kits that only cost a few dollars and were cheaper than separate components.

Even better response were possible with slight mods as I say to these things, with the LM386 kits I always suggest the replacement of the usually 220uF output cap that also features on the F/R design for a 100uF cap, this seems to give better string balance often able to sustain chords quite well, and better high string response, the rest of it is identical to the LM386 data sheet really, so nothing special there except that the F/R design as offered omitted parts to help keep it stable.

I have had no problem with high string response that many apparently find or assume are a problem and often such things can be found to be more a problem with the coil potting, design, apparently wire gauge (that many refute) and distortions and oscillation feedback.

I suggest a particular wire gauge because I know the results tested alongside others, it is a myth to suggest that I or anyone else suggests there is something magical at work here. This gauge and design simply worked better with consistent results for me. Different gauges have different characteristics and power requirements, my choice and suggestion is just my balance of factors and known to work.

30AWG wire is bigger than I have suggested before and I suspect it may take the more power you have in this circuit to get the results you have obtained, it would appear that many have sought more power with such coils with success. It's good if this amp and coil combo works without producing distortions and noise in the pickup from EMI or other factors, more power can often lead to more squeal or other unwanted interference I have found, in later designs I continued towards using the least power possible to get the result I liked...battery life, EMI and other factors influencing this direction...the main thing is of course that it works!

The circuits I designed in recent times were intended to bridge that gap for people that wanted a purpose built compact circuit adaptable to their projects, it contained most of the features people might want on board, and was not a pasting together of various other circuits as the F/R is, but this project would still require a varied skill set to be successful. The wafer coil was also designed to address the coil winding aspects. Unfortunately, for various reasons the release of these has been permanently (it would seem) postponed.

My design for people who know what they are doing is able to be basically replicated from the information provided, but not suitable for general construction and obtaining of parts for your average builder, it does use the LM386 chip as it happens as the basic building block which clearly is out of favor with some, but allowed basic AGC to be implemented to save power, avoid noise and give more control and options from the 'drive' control. Such touches are just icing on the cake, the circuit is basically an amplifier, the chip as long as it does the job is a bit of a red herring as most have been found to be suitable. Some modern chips though are designed for music type things and not the constant high level signal that a sustained string offers up, and has heat problems and auto shutoff features that activate under these conditions. This is why I stopped experimenting with these alternatives some time ago, but certainly there is nothing 'magical' about the LM386 and the F/R was never the kind of design I would have advocated (though many have found it to work well and suggested mods make it work much like mind have from the past).

But this is the nature of the project, it is not for everyone or every situation. Glad to hear you have found some success and if used with just a single pickup guitar, should work fine as is I would imagine.

[space_ryerson]

the coil measures at seven ohms and the chip is a 2073

Thanks! I'm guessing that's a NJM2073?

[ArMelvin1]

PSW- so forgive me if i sound stupid or if im asking a secret of you but what chip do you use and do you think this would work with smaller wire? I did some more tests and this time i added DPDT switch to switch the leads to see if i got the harmonic and mixed modes, the sustain mode worked just the same and the harmonic mode is i guess working it sustains just a higher note than the actual string tell me if this is how its supposed to work please?

the mixed mode though seems wrong i can hear the odd EMI sounds if im not actually touching the strings or bridge? Anyways i have played notes that sustain and of course open strings however it seems that it works a little too well on the G string (standard tuned guitar) meaning that if im trying to sustain the b or e and im not muting the G the sound of the G will overpower the others, I'm guessing its somehow connected to a dominant frequency within the circuit or related to the pickup? don't know like i said im not much more skilled than a standard guitar wiring job. I did realize though that i somehow used the neck pickup as the source! and i got squeal holding it above the neck and bridge pickups but not in between or right between the neck pickup and neck where i have seen you mount yours.

ryerson- the chip says Jrc with the numbers 2073C above jrc and 5075G below it sorry for any confusion.

[elmo7sharp9]

the harmonic mode is i guess working it sustains just a higher note than the actual string tell me if this is how its supposed to work please?

Yes, that's precisely how it works.

Feeding an inverted signal to the strings damps the fundamental note and encourages

other pitches, already present in the string's harmonic series, to dominate.

the mixed mode though seems wrong i can hear the odd EMI sounds if im not actually touching the strings or bridge?

You're likely to be using more gain to get the same level of sustain in the harmonic mode

as you would get in fundamental mode,

so you're amplifying any ambient electrical noise and radiating it from your driver coil.

This noise diminishes when you touch the strings or bridge because you're grounding yourself,

thus eliminating the major cause of near-field electrical noise .

Anyways i have played notes that sustain and of course open strings however it seems that it works a little too well on the G string (standard tuned guitar) meaning that if im trying to sustain the b or e and im not muting the G the sound of the G will overpower the others, I'm guessing its somehow connected to a dominant frequency within the circuit or related to the pickup?

There are several factors that cause certain strings and notes to dominate.

The ideal sustainer would have a source pickup with a completely flat frequency response,

followed by a flat-response amplifier, feeding into a flat-response driver.

Real-world guitar pickups have a pronounced midrange peak

(Early commercial sustainers insisted on using their replacement flat-response source pickup).

Real-world amplifiers are not ideal...

Even with a flat frequency design,

the phase relationship between input and output varies with frequency

The ideal sustainer would operate on a balanced string set,

where each string would respond equally well to a drive signal.

Real-world string sets have a wide spread of string masses

(more mass=more iron=more drive for the same current)

and string inertias (looser strings=less inertia).

You can see that it's a trade-off between these two factors.

You can overcome this, to some extent,

by having the blade or polepieces of the driver at different

distances from each string.

The ideal sustainer would operate on a guitar that didn't have pronounced

mechanical resonances.

Real-world guitars are full of them - it's a major component of the character of the guitar.

These factors all multiply together to give us quirky results,

even from the best designs.

[space_ryerson]

ryerson- the chip says Jrc with the numbers 2073C above jrc and 5075G below it sorry for any confusion.

No worries Thanks for the info.

[ArMelvin1]

thank you so much elmo that really cleared up a lot of stuff i think when i finally install this thing in a guitar im gonna start building ill put in adjustable pole pieces to balance this out. just to cover my basses i always saw single coil drivers, so sorry if i missed someone talking about it but i was wondering if that would be possible in a sustainer i know humbuckers are meant to cancel out certain frequencies to eliminate hum im just wondering if you could do certain balancing tricks with a dual coil design and increase the sustainers abilities. or if it will just cancel out the goal of the sustainer. anyways I wanted to thank everyone for their posts and help you have all really cleared up some the murkiness i had in this project.

[elmo7sharp9]

im just wondering if you could do certain balancing tricks with a dual coil design and increase the sustainers abilities. or if it will just cancel out the goal of the sustainer.

You are describing what's known around here as a bilateral driver.

Some commercial designs apply a common signal to 2 separate coils, for bass and treble strings,

with the same goal as a humbucker, to eliminate radiated noise.

The coils are electrically out-of-phase and the permanent magnet for each coil is attached with opposing polarity.

The end result is that both sets of strings are driven in the same mode,

but the electrical noise radiated towards the source pickup is largely cancelled.

This arrangement allows more gain to be used in the sustainer circuit,

without unwanted noise or squealing.

It's particularly helpful when using a single coil pickup as the Source pickup.

If your "humbucking" driver covered all 6 strings and was the same size and shape as a regular humbucking pickup,

there's a danger of there being "dead spots" in the sustain - at frequencies whose period

is some multiple of the distance between the polepieces (high notes, mostly).

DIY experimenters on PG have reported success with drivers based on this arrangement,

but using a far smaller distance (millimetres) between the coils,

so that the coils are operating to assist each other throughout the guitar's range.

[Paul Marossy]

As of the past ten minutes i have had one note on my guitar sustaining. Right now i have no pics or videos to share as proof but i will when I can. Anyways i made the 'standard' driver wrapping 30AWG wire from the Shack on an old thin bobbin and affixed a magnet to it as for my amp/pre-amp i will honestly say I had no idea what I'm doing there. I tried making the Fetzer/Ruby and several others none with success, so in desperation and an astounding step of luck I used an on board effect i bought on Ebay from guitarfetish its the mini tube driver originally meant to power a small on board speaker so i thought why not after all the driver is essentially a speaker minus the cone right? And lo and behold IT WORKED!!!

So if you play a chord and let it ring, it sounds like you have a Ebow on all six strings? Or does it sound like an amp that is feeding back?

[psw]

PSW- so forgive me if i sound stupid or if im asking a secret of you but what chip do you use and do you think this would work with smaller wire? I did some more tests and this time i added DPDT switch to switch the leads to see if i got the harmonic and mixed modes, the sustain mode worked just the same and the harmonic mode is i guess working it sustains just a higher note than the actual string tell me if this is how its supposed to work please?

the mixed mode though seems wrong i can hear the odd EMI sounds if im not actually touching the strings or bridge? Anyways i have played notes that sustain and of course open strings however it seems that it works a little too well on the G string (standard tuned guitar) meaning that if im trying to sustain the b or e and im not muting the G the sound of the G will overpower the others, I'm guessing its somehow connected to a dominant frequency within the circuit or related to the pickup? don't know like i said im not much more skilled than a standard guitar wiring job. I did realize though that i somehow used the neck pickup as the source! and i got squeal holding it above the neck and bridge pickups but not in between or right between the neck pickup and neck where i have seen you mount yours.

ryerson- the chip says Jrc with the numbers 2073C above jrc and 5075G below it sorry for any confusion.

I have received a lot of flak in the last year about my choice to stick with the LM386 for my work. Sure, I have tried heaps of different options with varied results, but I still found the chip fairly indestructible, easy to obtain and very flexible in the way they can be used...they are not state of the art, but then most modern chips are not designed to cope with such applications anyway and this can have unwanted side effects including total shutdown due to heating...but that is not to say they can't work.

So the answer is that fairly consistently I have had good results from the LM386 and it seems to provide plenty of power to make the strings vibrate as much as anyone would reasonably want with my coil designs. I still use a 100uF output cap on such 386 based circuits for the sustainer...generally.

The preamp more buffer stage is there pretty much to avoid loading, matching the impedance of the circuit to the typical guitar pickups. I used to use a fair amount of gain, but this was overloading the input of the LM386 making it distort, sometimes useful with low powered pickups, but generally I have not found a lot of gain necessary. The F/R fits this bill, but I suggested mods to make it a bit more stable...it has worked for some without these apparently.

There is a lot of controversy about my recommendation for a particular wire gauge (0.2mm), this was found to be the best for me by trial and error of winding similar coils, same circuits with various wire gauges. I've still found this to be an efficient design.

The harmonic mode is a harmonic generated above the normal sound of the note...often a fifth or fourth plus an octave, but sometimes simply an octave.

Mixed mode, I am not sure what you are doing to get this? I get a kind of mixed sound with my 100uF cap on higher power on the lower notes, a kind of bloom into a harmonic, and this is the sound I choose to have as my default on my guitars.

The G string can be particularly easy to drive, but muting is vital with any sustainer guitar. If using if for recording or whatever, you can cheat if there is no open strings in use by lightly wrapping a sock or something around the nut end of the strings...but damping, important to learn anyway!

It's not clear exactly how you have set things up...are you saying that you have mounted the pickup between the neck and bridge pickups and working? I did try all kinds of mid coil drivers with little practical success and when I did get things that worked, it was kind of a little pointless for the effort. So, except for the experimental projects, all of my drivers are in the neck position and use the bridge pickup exclusively as are commercial units. I use a 4pdt switch on multi pickup guitars to completely disconnect all pickups, select the bridge regardless of selector position and turn the power on.

So, no real secret with the circuit, but if yours works and happy with it, go with that. I don't think there are any magic in chip numbers, the idea of the amp is to simply produce an AC signal in the simplest implementation, to do more you need to invest a lot of time and effort and experimentation to carry it off.

Really I'd need to see a little more detail to make a lot of comment on how your device is going and such, it can be difficult sometime to know what people have done and the results they have achieved, this project has a history of people going their own way and this can result in radically different outcomes at times, leading to confusion as to a lot of things and make it seem as if problems some people are having plague everyone's work...high string response say, or the effectiveness of a circuit that happens to use a particular chips and such.

...

Sorry, got called away for quite a bit before I could send reply, the sustainer thread has lots on such things as HB drivers and the like and this kind of thing will take again, experimentation and work, those who have done similar like Col with HB drivers posted a lot for instance and many designs are offered up there including things like Col's more adventurous circuit ideas, but if making circuits is outside your skill set you may be operating on a hit and miss basis with your skill set, just a thought, no reason not to have a go if you have a mind to of course.

[col]

the bold in the posts confuses me :?

i saw guitar fetish and had a look at the website - guess its this one

http://store.guitarfetish.com/on25waguamdr.html

looks fun

all of which i managed to do without highlighting pointless words in bold... seriously - whats that about? are punctuation and explanation marks not enough??? (not that i claim to use those things well)

Yep that's the one just wired everything like normal

used little jumpers from the source pickup signal on the guitar's switch and one to the casing for ground and the driver i connected to the speaker - and +

Think about that for a minute - 2.5 watts

Now, even assuming the amp and circuit are 100% efficient (in reality it will be more like 50%) to run at 2.5 watts, it would need to draw a steady 220mA from a 9 volt battery - that's way too much. the mAh rating of alkalines drops dramatically as the power drain rises, running AT 220mA, yo probably won't get an hour out of a battery before the voltage drops to an unusable level.

e.g. a graph on the everready alkaline pp3 datasheet shows that the batter provides around 450mAh with a steady drain of 100mA so you get about 4.5 hours, when the drain is 300, you're only getting about 280 mAh from the same battery, so less than an hour. Unfortunately these figures are for draining the battery until it reaches 4.8 volts which is way too low to be useful for a sustainer - assuming you want a nice clean steady signal.

More likely is that the marketing for that amp module is bogus. The chip is capable of around 2 Watts, but will be set up for much less ?

Probably fine for sustainer as long as you don't max it out for long stretches (unless you want lots of fuzzy sound and a flat battery

Of course, switching over to phantom power would dodge this issue (and introduce others)

cheers

Col

[Paul Marossy]

As of the past ten minutes i have had one note on my guitar sustaining. Right now i have no pics or videos to share as proof but i will when I can. Anyways i made the 'standard' driver wrapping 30AWG wire from the Shack on an old thin bobbin and affixed a magnet to it as for my amp/pre-amp i will honestly say I had no idea what I'm doing there. I tried making the Fetzer/Ruby and several others none with success, so in desperation and an astounding step of luck I used an on board effect i bought on Ebay from guitarfetish its the mini tube driver originally meant to power a small on board speaker so i thought why not after all the driver is essentially a speaker minus the cone right? And lo and behold IT WORKED!!!

So if you play a chord and let it ring, it sounds like you have a Ebow on all six strings? Or does it sound like an amp that is feeding back?

I'll assume that it's working on the principle of electro-magnetic feedback since there is no speaker involved.

[col]

As of the past ten minutes i have had one note on my guitar sustaining. Right now i have no pics or videos to share as proof but i will when I can. Anyways i made the 'standard' driver wrapping 30AWG wire from the Shack on an old thin bobbin and affixed a magnet to it as for my amp/pre-amp i will honestly say I had no idea what I'm doing there. I tried making the Fetzer/Ruby and several others none with success, so in desperation and an astounding step of luck I used an on board effect i bought on Ebay from guitarfetish its the mini tube driver originally meant to power a small on board speaker so i thought why not after all the driver is essentially a speaker minus the cone right? And lo and behold IT WORKED!!!

So if you play a chord and let it ring, it sounds like you have a Ebow on all six strings? Or does it sound like an amp that is feeding back?

I'll assume that it's working on the principle of electro-magnetic feedback since there is no speaker involved.

I think his point is that there are still 2 ways it could be feeding back:

#1 the good way:

the driver generates a magnetic field that excites the string, the pickup senses the vibrations of the string. (sounds like ebow)

#2 the bad way:

the driver generates a magnetic field that is directly sensed by the pickup, bypassing the strings.(sounds like squealing feedback)

cheers

Col

[Paul Marossy]

I think his point is that there are still 2 ways it could be feeding back:

#1 the good way:

the driver generates a magnetic field that excites the string, the pickup senses the vibrations of the string. (sounds like ebow)

#2 the bad way:

the driver generates a magnetic field that is directly sensed by the pickup, bypassing the strings.(sounds like squealing feedback)

cheers

Col

That's what I was trying to figure out. Yeah, if it's an arrangement where it excites the strings, this would be good. Not so good if it just sounds like an amp feeding back. Hard to control and not necessarily musical sounding.

Having had a Fernandes Sustainer in one of my guitars for a couple of weeks now, I can say that they have the harmonic mode figured out pretty well. You can actually do something musical with that. And the sustain mode works very nicely, it will hold a note until the battery dies. I looked up the patent for this one just for fun - it's 50 pages long!

Edited March 31, 2010 by Paul Marossy