ansil

you know i read alot of posts here when i am coming and going, between the breakins and the moving of my various places and an insane work schedule lots of things get missed which i appologize for and am rectifiying. however with all the wiring questions and pickup swapping going on i was wondering in todays modular world and with active manufactors like emg doing it why do people insist on wiring up the old fashioned way. personally i had a guitar that i was a pickup demon on but i liked the wiring setup in the guitar and it had an ultra thin cavity on it. so i wired it up the way i wanted it and put molex style plugs on everything. alittle bit of heat shrink tubing and you can swap your pickups out in no time. i am looking for a pic right now, but they make these great four pin connectors on older powersupplys for computers that were the aproximate size of a dime. hey what do you know some dead header pins heat shrink and you can put plugs on the main parts of your axe. imagine if you will a regular pot with terminals on it a plug slides on it. a five way switch that has a plug wired on it. i have played around with various methods for years and despite throwing a guitar across the room into the wall i have yet to see one shake loose. just wondering. i mean it saves so much time in the long run and still allows you to test each pickup out with minimal work. i will post some pictures later as soon as i find a camera. ed

what i have seen based off your schematic on your site is that it isn't a paralle fx but a series one however they are using an opamp to drive it if you dont' use the fx loop [from first glance only] it bypasses the opamp and continues on tube to tube signal. perhaps using the master wide open, and then using another vol control behind the opamp is causing opamp saturation and with the different impedance of the volume box coupled with the opamps own output impedance could lead to the phase inverter seeing quite a different picutre not just a lowervolumed one. anyway just my quick glance. ed

have you tried opting for a different style tone control one that passivly blends between two capacitors so that you retain all the highs but you can alter how much lowend comes out if you have say a strat style tone control system you can put one as a high roll off and use the other one to taper the body of it. with some clever switching you can actually eliminate it on some settings and in the middle posisiton its nearly transparent. ed ps i did this on my lespaul about a year ago. loved it. later did it to my strat.

hey paul doesn't the hotdoddeville have a parralell fx loop? or at least a preset mix. i haven't bothered to check the schem on it.

similar in what you are talking about i put leds by the pickup selector so that they changed with the pickups so on a dark stage you always knew where you were at pickup wise. i was also adding in leds under the knobs to back light them but found smd leds to work better for that trick.

thats what a master vol does. it turns up the preamp before the poweramp. however depending on your setup you could be using the master volume to drive the fx loop output section a little harder utilizing it as an extra gain stage of sorts depending on your amp and its setup. ed

if you use long shaft pots and extremely long drill bits you can drill all the way through the guitar run a guitar string soldered to a piece of wire and pullit all through and your guitar is ready to be wired. thats how i did it. paddle bit into the back of the guitar to make a woodgrain pot cover about the size of a quarter. i was concerned about the amount of wood removed and thought the less i removed the better. did hlep out on the sound. but overall for all the stuff l I like to do with my guitars i only did it once.

you know just a buffer unity gain would take the load off the pickups and be a world of difference.

www.geofex.com search the secret life of pots

every one i have worked on had the old jrc chips in it. which read the whole tube screamer theory [better yet breadboard it and hear the difference] if you change them out with a better chip you will need to track down the caps that are in the feedback loop and increase this range. trust me on this one, every time i change them out to say the tlc2262 or such i get osc at high gain. however on the clean channel it does wonders for it you can play with the voltage for the preamp add in a microboard and a socket for the dual opamp in the preamp and change it out for a cd40107 its not a direct drop in, but if you look at the datasheet i think you can see a cool little trick to make and adaptor on it.

can i interject here? I have played nearly every major make and model amp, i did the whole scooped out mids thing and got over it. but what i found out was a couple of things., I am 6'3" tall. i am around 335 a very large guy indeed. when playing a half stack even and angled cab i have to be across the room from it to hear it. all i hear is my guitar player and feel the wind hitting my legs otherwise. and even then sometimes its difficult to make out. for me, i like the feel of a closed back cab but the only time i have been able to hear myself wihtout inear equipment was when i played with my open back cabinet turned around backwards it was louder out the back and this way i could use a vol pedal in the fx loop for on fly controls to get feedback at lowervolumes on full blown dist while the guitarist wsa on clean channels. i have run my rig through a crown poweramp and couldn't hear myself. so now i monitor with a smaller amp and save the bigger ones for miking and for the deaf drummer. ear protection man for the record too. depending on tonestacks and such but every marshall i played was weak with the mid less than 7.5-8 and i run the treble at 4.5-5.5 in terms of 6 being the middle of the silkscreen on the knob hope that helps, but honestly its ounds like you got a problem with the amp. does that have the dual fuses one for the highvoltage one for mains in it that you get in from the back. i worked on an 800 that was doing the same thing and it had a crap fuse it wasn't blown enough to stop operation but it wasn't getting full power, i changed the fuse with the exact same kind and rating and it worked like a charm. hope that helps. ciao ed

hammer had it set up with a three way toggle for series or parrallel or off setting for what would be the middle single coil. add that to a three way that controls the regular bucker and single coil. and actually the three coils together thing sounds quite interesting very thick but i did it with an old yamaha after playing my guitar teachers hamer. it was my first expirament in secret switching.

pots are funny beasts for those of us who can still hear the high freq the difference between 500k and 1 Meg is un holy in terms of the brightness. firgive my tyi[eing i have a cut finger. ed

I found this cool little thing at walmart made by rubbermade. its called a large J hook. works great for holding two guitars. and its onlyl 3.88usd make sure you mount it to a stud though.. ciao

well alas i dont' have a pic GregP. I am sorry but basically all i did was pull out the pedals trim up the foam with a razor knife and then glue on some very nice gothic black fuzzy material [fuzzy but not linty] and then sewed on some nice burgundy material [kind of like a coffin liner for a bad horror movie] plus all the fun stuff like custom switching and a custom 2A powersupply with sag options. it was a sweet piece but i ended up ripping out the nice burgundy material and scrapped the whole thing because the guy stopped paying on it and i lost the switching schematic that i spent a couple of days on. after that i just chunked it. but i am like that sometimes i just can it. The first Vampyre amp head i just chucked it [the head not the chasis and parts] And i junked the First penguin amp head [but to be fair the head box i was using for it was a makeshift one as perry was building his own but i had no contact with him for months on end so i was unsure if we were still on or not later i needed the money and sold it after christmas] anyway if i do another one i will try to take more pics now that i have the driver for my camera [cheapy one] and i have a new 160 gig HD that i can't get the computer to reckognize. ed

double post

very nice indeed. for those of you interested you can also use Greatstuff expansion foam to form fit your pedals. just wrap them up first.

i have seen better designs to my ears. but its not bad

a pot would be helpful it has alot of output with a guitar i mean think about it this thing can push a four twelve cab. not very loud but think of the relative sound pressure levels in relation to a headphone set. you could damage your ears. so yes some sort of volume pot or a fixed resistor. i would say expiraent with say a 22k half watt

only one??? if so you can do some mods to a pot based off of geofex.com mods the secret life of pots http://geofex.com/Article_Folders/potsecrets/potscret.htm effectively if you want it full on you would pick the point where you want it full on to start. and cover the pot from that point to its max rotation with a thin coat of solder. the pot resistance to ground would stay the same but you pick via the solder trace where it would top out. at least it looks good on paper and with a multimeter but i haven't put audio through it to see if its scratchy. ciao i got a little time tuesday if you want me to make you one and send it to you.

Well it would obviously be after the 220uf capacitor but you would need a stereo plug wired mono. also you would want to add in some sort of volume atenuation as the 386 can hurt your ears. it would be best to expirament with a pot and see how much resistance you need.

EMG's support page has a wealth of info on their products, and how to use them - check it out. I stand corrected.

yes but you would need to change the impedance as it is desgined for actives.

you can actually use a momentray switch so that the wah only comes on when you step on it just like a morley. they were at radioshack and were 4 for 2.39 wheni started doing this mod 10 years ago. it all depends on what you wish to do. perosnally they are so small i ended up counter sinking them to the bottom of the wah rocker underneath the pad so you could barely feel them under your foot. worked great however you need two of them since they are only spst, unless you have a clever wiring diagram for them. email me or wheni get off work i will post a schematic if i remeber too.

i plugged a guitars pickups into the freaking wall man, and it diditn' hurt them. don't sweat it. oh and in case you were wondering, yes it was on purpose and no one was holding it. but an ac cord and a guitar plug make a nice little toy for things not capacitor coupled. PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS I CAN NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ed