ansil

500k will work as well its just xhanging the out impedance.

i agree. say have you ever tried mis matching the impedance of the emg pickups. omg i about died the first time i just said screw it dual one meg pots in my ibanez with a single emg 81. i had a volume and a tone with a 1uf on the tone knob. it sounds like over kill but it completely makes them sound different and punishes the amp. the only downside is haveing to dial the volume knob back even on clean settings. but they seem to for lack of a better word "breathe"

something to try but its still active. using an inverting input on a opamp with a steep set of filters on it. try it its interesting.

true on all respects however the idea for me was not one to rewire the guitar. this circuit can be installed in minutes and requires no rewiring of the circuit. its an add on. which is soemthing i haven't really seen. as far as completely removing the pickup and rewiring of course you could just detune a bit and make the 60hz hum just fall into the a region and then you are putting the hum in the same range of the guitar. instead of inbetween. of course you can tune slightly up as well. which is why i tuned in between e and f in my younger days ed

yes

yes it is a noise gate but instead of cutting off the signal it just adds in the middle coil. ed

did

VERY VERY TRUE! man thats the thing i learned some time ago. what a difference it makes. unless its a crazy or modded tone now i dont' even hook them up

well first the amplification proccess is not for the output of the guitar. it steals signal from the output so the guitar is still passive. basically it has a gain of about 20 or so on the first stage which drives the second stage out of phase from the first so the two output combine through a bridge rectifier circuit to drive or light an led. the led usually works with an ldr to control the gain in the first opamp feedback loop stage. but we are using it to control voltage to an inverter which then is tied to a jfet as its control voltage. which shuts off the second coil from the output but not from the switch. so the pure unaffected signal is still there.

so as with every new computer i get online with i end up drawing up something crazy. this time is no exepction. i get so tired of the hum from single coils. no matter what brand i use there is always some bleed through hum. but i love strats so i shield them and do all the tricks and this gets it down really well but still in a noisy envirament it will be annoying but its only when i am playing low or not playing. tone wise in these situations it would be easier to be in the in between settings while i am not playing. so being a logic programmer in college i built my truth table and went at an age old problem from a crazy persons view. heres the pic. basically i am taking an old compessor circuit stripping it down. using the jfet switch idea from boss but cleaning it up a bit. and saying that when the guitar is being played in the neck or bridge posistion it is in single coil mode. when i am just standing there not playing it is in the inbetween settings. as soon as i hit the strings they cut out the middle pickup

side note if you watch the zvex video on the nano head or is it the dual ipod head the shock factor is something like 50g

it depends on where you put the afterburner. if you put it after the volume pot. then no use normal pots. if you put it straight after the pickup before switches and pots then yes put in low imp pots. the question to ask is what kind of pickup system are you running and where do you want it in the schematic. its only low imp after the output stage of the preamp not before. so if you only got one then afterwards is the case. and use normal pots ed

something that people forget when the offer up socketing the chip is explanation of why different chips sound different. whether it be slew rates. or other such "mojo" there are very viable reasons for changing chips in a preamp it all depends on what you want. alot of people really love the old 4558. lol i guess its one of those love hate things. but slightly side stepping topic here the previous mentioned chip has no real treble response. which is why it sounds great in a ts9 or copy. the 741 was obosolete and noisy when it hit the market but they stamped a billion or ten of them so what do you do but use them. personally i dig the tlc2262 for all my dual opamp needs but mainly cause it is r to r opamp that clips very smooth. something to help influence your decisions perhaps. ed

actually there is no real problem with what i said. if you read above it says that you can add a single mosfet or jfet to help drive it. you will lose a little signal with the way i showed itabove but it will work all the same which is why i used the resistors i chose above. for the hpf that has reistor to ground i chose a 2M so that it wouldn't affect the impedance as a lower resistance would monkey with the imp of the vol pot. and i used a small resistor for the lpf so you wouldn't lose that much signal. seeing as its really only attenuating the mids everthing else is cool you shouldn't notice that much of a difference. ciao ed

you can get quite a good filter utilizing the rc network lpf 1.9k .15uf cap. 558.7hz freq range. for the hpf 2M 150pf or .00015uf if my conversion is solid gives us 530.8hz. hope that helps. also you can add a single buffer in there such as a mosfet or a jfet and do a dual design. the current rc single filter section gives you -6db per octave. with two in series you can double that.

bruce bennett told me about how he took plastic bobbins for a sewing machine and wound them on the sewing machine with standard pickup wire. wired them all together so he had twelve individual coils combined to make a humbucker. I tinkered with this idea but only made six coils and parallelled it with a single side of a humbucker. i had a friend of mine try this in high school with six single coils and he liked it i thought it was very strange. but useful on some things as an background sound. currently i am trying to work my new pickup idea taking two parrallel coils and interleaving them together so they cross in the middle for pseudo humcanceling. and putting a single alnico magnet in the middle of it.

not sure i stated this earlier but with a little tooling you can take a standard carvin fiveway switch and give it a budge to make it a sixway. if you get really tricky you can make it a seven way. although it becomes a little trickier to hit the exact posistions. see if you can get a pic of the switches you will see what i mean. ciao for now ed

well what is your switch. i know its a five way. but you have many different options. for instance a single five way switch will have 6 contacts. one common and five selections. ok you with me so far. now you have multiple poles and throws most common five way blade switches will have double the above mentioned posistions. they move together though so they will still only have five way but now you have in effect two fiveways' glued together for arguments sake. now depending on the manufactur on a rotary you look at the inner posistions. you will most likely have two lugs inner and a ring of ten outer rings. the two inner are your outputs and the others are your switch posistions. you need to look at the contacts if you can and turn it to the extreme either way and find the contacts touching. one will touch center one will touch outer then move it one posistion and there is your scheme. ps its backwards on the other side due to the other switch being 180 degrees out of sync. i recently did a six way toggle. send me apic of your switch and i will decipher it for you. i got some time l8r i will see if i can't wire this up for ya. ed k now i see that you said lever switch the prs comment threw me off. as most of them are rotary that i have seen that is. i need to know how many posistions this switch has sorry poles. to draw this up accurately. i can draw it for the mega switch. its not that complicated really i have a little diagram i will explain till i can load it. if you look at the guitar pickups as prewired devices. say two pickups neck pickup has north coil to ground left side of pickups is tied together ie usually the red and green wires. depending on make and models. and then you have your hot wire of the south coil. now imagine the bridge pickup the exact opposite. north coil to switch through south coil to ground. so now posistion one is done. pos two ie the inner coils is the jumping pos one and five togheter and adding a ground wire to each outer coil. pos three is the same as two no ground to the outer coils. posi four is easier just utilize the outer coils tied together. you can also add a ground to the third to pos three to accomplish this.for position four. and pos five is wired. ok that seems hard BTW my keys are sticking on the laptop so please dont' email me on my spelling i am doing this before ii get kicked out of the wifi spot its past closing. its alot easier if you see the pic i will try to finish it and get it up tonight. ciao for now. btw i have used this wiring diagram before and its verified as working although not eough difference beteen inner and outer coils to warrant having its own setting. ed ansilgregory@yahoo.com

i find that if you really want to play your instrument that straight wiring no jacks no nothing straight into a box full of options is the best way to find out what you like. sure its a little time consuming and barbaric but hey nothiungs free man. i once put an ibanez with relay's in for the switching and had like thirteen pins or something ridiculous coming out of it to a custom pedal board with dip switches and knobs and settings. in a nutshell it was one of the hardest craziest things i have ever done. you could step on the smoky setting and get what i call that smoky hendrix tone medium gain inside pickups beautiful tone. then step on the Metal patch and you get full on humbuckers it was quite a few switches but it did amp gain reverb eq and pickup settings all in one and 90% of it was all hardwired analog stuff no digital cause well i was an idiot and wanted to work myself to death. lol. now i pretty much stick with the wiring i did when i first came here the 12 posistion wiring diagram for hum single hum. yields all the tones i need. and couple that with adding in a piezo in the neck pocket and two on the tremblock and the strat quacks crys screams does it all but hum

build it into a box man and try it out see if you like it.

Well its been along time since i contributed to the diy comunity here so i am back. Now for th past what fifty years we have had the same controls on guitars. Now why is this is it becuase they are totally awesome and work better than we could dream of? Or is it that guitarist on average fear change more than Baptist preachers. (I grew up IN the bible belt so this isnt' a slam ok go thump somewhere else) Sadly its true most of us would just assume to fade into mediocrity with out tone controls on our fancy belchfire blast o rama guitars we have made at our wonderful projectguitar site. Its funny to see how electronics have grown here and how many people i sucked in here from aron's site. any who i digress. here below is a few examples of circuits i have been explaining to folks below. This is the stripped down version of what i was talking about. here you have a basic lespaul in this case the neck pickup here with the pickup strapped across the volume pot. nothing new here. but now instead of the top lug of the volume pot going to the tone now we sub the tone as a blend pot that is no longer grounded. this basically gives the pickup some room to breathe and now we can blend betwen full range of the pickup and rolling some low end off for some tighter runs on the neck pickup without mudding up the signal too much in the second pic you see bascialy the same setup but this time the resistor is removed and a trim pot is added. now you can tweak this a little more to your liking. these values shown are for specific customers and should only be used as guides to finding out what you like. There is no wrong and right here only what you like hearing when you play and how much control you desire. This is the full on schematic of the lespaul i modified recently. This thing was a tonally dead as a guitar can possibly get. the pickups are very high output treble mid swing on a lespaul but if you touch the original controls it turns into a dull dead instrument. by changing the tone cap to .1uf on the bridge we changed the range of the tone knob's sweep a trick taught by Bruce Bennett. The neck has the Same mod as before now when we roll off the tone knob we get a cleaned up sound on the neck it still has plenty of bottom end but not nearly as much as when you roll the knob back in. The best scenario is when you apply the pickups together in the middle setting with a little knob tweaking you can get a nice woody sound that resembles an acoustic. does it sound like a vintage prewar martin.... Of course not. does it give a useful sound that makes studio guys scratch their heads? Of course. if you have any questions on this feel free to ask,howver its quite simple but extremly usefull. ok time for bed ed

thats cool my friend i actually do build my own amps and sell them. i have been for the last four years i am just always interested in hearing others opinions. Ole wild bill as i called him was my mental sparring partner for many years here and when he passed i stopped posting for a while for many reasons not many people would tolerate my crazy ideas and well on top of that not many people would want me calling them at 3 in the morning to tell them i sent them a new schematic i was working on and what do you think of it. lol. anyway he is gone so for the most part i am locked away in my mental hell of ideas and occasionally i come back to the real world to talk to people. that and my internet was down and now i got a laptop. but i really do my best work with doing cmos switching stuff like i did in engineering school. i spent three years in EE school for Electronic engineering in computers and Robotics. but it taught me nothing about guitar electronics i learned that from books googling and talking to Chaps on this board and others. Party on Wayne Party on Garth

power headroom etc however the transformer for the voltage needed is like 8 usd before shipping being a dealer in parts and such. mostly there was an old site lk turned me onto on tube amp design lessons and it was talking about marshall's being run closer to design max to get the sound they got. however obvioulsy they are not but it was interesting to see this old amp come into the shop a few years back that had an el34 run at well over 650volts and it was one of the best powersections i had the chance to hoook up to. keep in mind however it was really old and i dont' remember what it was but it got me thinking of recreating something along those lines. seeing as if you look up some of the old champ schematics they are getting nearly 400v or so and most of the datasheets for the 6v6 state 300 volts aprox max. and yet they sound amazing it lead me to expirementing with other tubes running at close or over tolerances. obviously i dont' want to blow the thing up. but if running design spec's yields tones close to what i got before, and gives me around 6mos average life or better i am pleased. it seems we should chat sometime about tube amps i enjoy building them for myself. drop me email we can talk. i am currently playing with 12sk7's and 12sj7's as i had a box of them. they work nicely. and sound great as an output tube for a mini champ. we built a mini marshall with a couple of them.

the question is do you want tube or solidstate. you can get really good sounds out of either. really the heart of a good amp is a rock solid powersupply. some people like a sagging powersupply some like one that will deliver the goods. i personally am working on a single ended el34 design with an 850V powersupply with 1200v caps on the power section. and around 90uf or better filtering on just the output section. the preamp supply is in the 400v range with a switchable eq section between the 1st stage and the third. utilizing a 6dx8 tube i get the best of pentode glory and triode goodness. personally i like pentodes the first guitar amps used them cause they cost less than triodes and now isn't it intersting how history has reversed itself. having said this. i also own a hughs and kettner blue 30r that i got for a song cause it was dead. it works nicely now that i upped the power supply voltage a little. i replaced the blown tda 2050 with a lm1875. the one i have shows the same pinout with a greater voltage ratting than the tda and it is really nice. so for a few bucks i replaced the powerstage. upped the tranny with one laying around the house. put in some sockets for the ic's and added some tlc222 dual opamps for the gain channel as it makes it sound closer to a tube amp. no it doesn't sound like a tube amp but its amazing how good it sounds. i left the clean channel as is cause it never distorted when i hit hard with buckers so i figure why fix somethign that isn't broken. both tube and solid state amps require a well built power section as this is the backbone of the amp since afterall we are just modulating a power supply into moving a speaker. food for thought

i tell everyone this. remove the stock tone control ie or just cut the connecting wire to the vol. check out what your guitar sounds like for real. then utilize and eq pedal or rack mount to determine the freq you would like to shape. for instance the old m3's had an inductor in them so they sucked out 1khz according to the paperwork i never tested this after all. personally i used duncans's tone stack calculator and found a nice eq setting i liked and added that in my guitar. although i did this with a single mosfet driving it. a simple turn of the knob goes from mid boost similar to a wah but not as harsh down to a basic bass heavy mid and high's nominal sound. but that is me. another option is to http://www.muzique.com/schem/filter.htm and take the math out of it and plug in your numbers to get the freq response you want. i am not saying you won't lose a little bit of output but its an interesting option ot do. keep in mind one thing though in the case of a lowpass filter is that the series resistance will need to be reallysmall to keep down on loss's. and on a highpassfilter the resistance will need to be high to match the internal resistance needed for the pickups to function properly. another option is to apply this individually to the pickups themselves and switch it on and off via the tone switch then have the volume pot. this will allow you to not be hampered by the volume pot's imp. and alas there is my standard trick of putting in a resistor and a cap in series and paralleling that with another smaller cap and using the tone pot as a blend pot for tone with no connection to ground. in doing so you now have reduced the load and you are utilizing the capacitor inline with the guitar which will have more effect on which capacitor (not enough really to worry.) you use. keep in mind also the human ear can not really distinguish much more than a factor of 10X to perceive a 2X increse or decrease in freq and gain response. thus if you are going to implement my idea you would need to take say a 1uf cap and a .01uf cap (i realize this is more than ten fold but this is taken from an actual working instrument) keep in mind you will lose some bass energy with the smaller cap so i add a smalll trim pot or resistor to the larger capacitor much in fact like an old layout for say a marshal or fender tone stack. where the treble pot as it is called is actually a blend it is blending via the 250k pot a say 470pf and a .022uf cap. and the rest of the circuit has a different effect but if you look at the 68 - 100k slope resistor you see this inhibits bass frequencies. do not fear though the amount of tone and volume you saved by cutting out the original cap and pot to ground makes up for any losses you will incur with my mods. the nice thing about this is you can make your pickups custom to your axe. you got a bass heavy neck pickup lets fix it. too much treble in the lead pickup roll some off. the really nice trick is when you do this you get an interesting effect when you combine them together then you get more of a notch filter which i have been hard pressed to find someone who didnt like it. AS WITH ALL MY MODS AND ADVICE, DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. I AM INSANE AND HAVE SPENT WAY TOO MANY HOURS DISECTING TONE IN THE STUDIO AT HOME AND SUCH. as LK used to tell me i am sort of a weird genius at making stuff that shouldn't work happen. ps if you need some schematics let me know i can draw up most of this stuff in a heartbeat but i dont' get online but about twice aweek so drop me an email. not a pm