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mixing it up


scrier7

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so ive decided to either mod my guitar or gut an old one and re build the electronics. unfortunately ive decided i want to use part off an old stereo among other things like a graphic EQ problem is i dont have any knowledge on electrics whatsoever - i might just about be able to get away with fitting pickups but i hvaent a clue where to start when it comes to adding or modifying tone control

any help?

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mkay

if you want to add a graphical EQ then the first thing you should probablly do is sort out where the controls will be and how you're going to fit all the electronics inside. if you have a small control cavity then you will probablly have to rout out a bigger space to put stuff in.

secondlly, using an EQ from a stereo might be tricky since if its a set of active filter circuits (which it almost certainlly will be) then you will need to power it and since its from a stereo it may not just run off a 9 volt battery. also it may have a large current drain when running meaning it will eat batteries.

it is posable to get graphical EQs as integrated circuits in small 8 pin chips. as far as i know they are fairlly good and would probablly be the easiest option for you thi it means you would have to make your own circuit board

the standard tone control in a guitar is just a simple low pass filter meaning that you can set it to decrease the higher frequencies. a fairlly simple mod if you wanted to add more tone bending properties to the controls might be to add a control to roll off the low frequencies or maybe even a filter that could put a notch in the mid frequencies. both of these could be done with passive components and so would get round the problem of having to have power supplies

if you come up with a rough idea of what you want then we should be able to help you out

btw if i said anything here that goes over your head then please feel free to ask, i have a tendancy to do that sometimes lol.

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what im after ultimately is (i dont know the site but search under the guys name and it shoudl come up) something like the rick andrews patented thingy jig; ultimate tone control over all pick ups. but i want it to be cheap and i want to fit it myself, the personal touch you know!?!

basically i want the higher notes to really squeal and i want the lower notes smooth and creamy, but i dont like using pedals.

to further complicate things, i dont actually know what guitar im going to end up butchering to do this; im selling my current one, but i dont know what i want to get - i havent yet played a guitar that satisfies me, none of them make me wanna play them. ive designed my own from scratch but i cant make it and cant afford for it to be made but thats life i guess

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hhhmmm

ive had a look at the rick andrews thing and im a little dubious of it.

mainlly because it states that it doesnt use any batteries and is all passive electronics, when on the circuit board there are about 5 chips. they could just be resistor networks but im dubious. it also says that it has binary coded presets. but if there is no memory how can it store them

Tone Buster heres a link to the page btw

tbh man i think that trying to make a guitar do EVERYTHING, while doable, is alot of work. if you want to add a bit more control then you could find tone controls from stomp box pedals which may be useful. i think that the Big Muff has a nice tone control tacked onto the end and either the marshal blues breaker or the guvnor has a useful tone circuit in there as well

have a look at them

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using a quad opamp you could make two sets of filters one set per pickup.. assuming you have two pickups.. other wise you could do more or less.

split the range of the instrument between highs and lows on the guitar range.. ie split 4th fret F# on the D string to be the highest note allowed on the low side .. and G to be the lowest note allowed on the high side.

this woudl allow you to process with an eq style activity each half of the guitar per pickup too. and also control the output of the two halves of the freqency range with a slide potentiometer.

alternatively.. you could also make them out of phase with each other to make them defined more. a guitarist in a metal band i saw in florida approached me about making her seven string stand out more compared to her lespaul.

i looked at the freqrange of her LP and tried to match the peaks and valleys with the sevenstring.. on top of that we decided to go with the half phase idea mentioned above in a box she could turn on and off. similar in theory to using two tubes like an ab pushpull style circuit in a tube amp one for negative phase and one for positive.

we took it a step further and added the high and low balance and seperation in there. the current idea i am workign on was to have 90 degrees of phase seperation between bands.. so i could have my 40hz-180hz split and my 180hz-440hz split and then have everything above it split also at 90 degrees phase. still workign on that one though.. but the former works like a charm.

it will proablly be the second or third pedal released. this spring

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ive had a look at the rick andrews thing and im a little dubious of it.

Me, too! Looks impressive though, doesn't it, spinning hypnotically around and around? :D

mainlly because it states that it doesnt use any batteries and is all passive electronics, when on the circuit board there are about 5 chips. they could just be resistor networks but im dubious. it also says that it has binary coded presets. but if there is no memory how can it store them

I think you're right - those have to be resistor arrays. And the preset switches look like BCD encoded rotary switches, so that's where you "store" the presets (digital because the switches are "binary encoded"). So it's a big switch matrix that works by switching caps and resistors in a relatively standard tone control circuit. Clever, but since passive circuits can only cut, not boost, and with cheap graphic EQ chips readily available, why bother? I'm with Johnny, build or buy an active EQ. Try this page at RG Keen's Geofex for some ideas:

Simple, Easy Parametric and Graphic EQ's

(edited for typos)

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