ansil

http://www.hollis.co.uk/john/circuits.html will get you going check out the midi program changer

So here it is i have been working on this strat for a bit o time now. it started out as a squier strat pack type guitar but had an intriquing neck and a not so intriguing body. but it just so happens my broken neck american needed some loving so away we go. NO idea what the body was made out of. If i had to guess i would say ash but it was a lower end quality as they primered the whole damn thing b4 painting so alot of that showed through. relic'ing with the original scars too. i loved this thing till it broke the nut [ok ok i broke the nut with my heavy as hell 13 guage strings tuned to standard while cutting a lead at the studio.] so i figured lets rip it apart and canibalize it. body was already pretty worn so i figured i would maximize on that with a few modern tools such as a hammer and razors good ole fashioned sandpaper and other goodies. after baking the body in the oven for a few hours on low, it was straight to the open flame to burn designs and random stuff into it with natural gas and lighter fluid [everything was done with controlled bursts and fire extinguisher standing by got to keep the kiddies safe] where it promtly got cleaned up and put into a plastic bag and shoved into a freezer for two weeks. not a deep freezer just a regular 10 degree freezer like most people have in their kitchen. after removing it we went to chipping off burnt paint and stripping the bad areas away. a light sanding with 400 then 600 grit. wire brushing the inside of the control cavitiy to make for better adhesion. then after plenty buffing with 0000 grade steel wool and 1500 grit with lubricating oil we cleaned it up and started applying the copper shielding tape. skull inlay and foil tape close up of tape i found this on ebay for really cheap its only an inch or so wide but its real thick i was impressed and free shipping. i guess i should point out this is where we decided to add in the synth where the old output jack would be and add a new jack jem style on the rear of guitar. [still working on that]. also during initial wood workign and burning stages i added the skull inlay i belive you call it flood filled with black epoxy. its finally cured and sanding all that down now. still got a bit to go but hey its a work in progress. finally got the fat brass bridge off another american strat vintage saddles and some other goodies. hope you enjoy the pics. ed oh yeah rough scalop on the back of neck join with a nice snake skin type motive carved into wood then dyed and tung oiled. also decided that after using all the proper tools to make the scarf here look pretty and it did it didn't fit the whole motif of beat to a pulp so i butchered it up some more. some of the body gouges are from slamming it face and back first into the rough brick on side of my apartment and the smoothing it out with oil and sandpaper. went with stainless steel thingies and brass neck screws for the look. and still finishing the scallop job from 10th to 21 fret. back of neck was done Clapton style with super glue for a vintage feel. [do not try this without plenty of fresh air or a respirator its highly fumey] anyway sorry for the bad misspelling its late and i am tired ciao

not looking for current but voltage on your audio path. at every tube plate in preamp right up to the grid of the power tubes you have a coupling cap that allows ac voltage to pass ie the guitar signal and dc voltage to be stopped ie high voltagte. to test this. simply find where your high voltage ties into each tube. and with one end of meter tied to ground and the meter set on dc voltage at around 600-1000v use only one hand with the red probe to test both sides of the coupling caps. in a 12ax7 pin one and pin six. you should have your plate voltage on one side that touches the plate through the plate resistor. and the other side goes to a cap the output of the cap should have no voltage on it. if it does you have issues.

i have used the graphtech and quite enjoyed it but since it is a grounding issue for me for electrics i prefer to use them like the carvin ns1 which i will be purchasing shortly. i have used the baggs sytem but only for acoustic electric signals not midi

well dc on the lines can oscilate and cause the thing you speak of. also its quite easy to check the caps for leakage

rmc has been the best ones imho. i have them factory in my BM. sad i thought i was goign to have to replace the board a while back [had a broken wire i missed during inspection] it costs more than the guitar to replace what i paid for it. about 750usd for saddles and preamp

i used to sell diy kits on ebay with my former buisness partner before he went of to college at mtsu. one thing that sold for us was a simple design based around a single tube so you can understand how it works and with minimal parts investment. we used a 6dx8 or other pentode/triode tubes its not that loud on clean but you get some nice drive with a dirty signal. if you like i could send you a schematic

emg 81's and most other emg's use approx 80 micro amps. or .08ma. now if you use one of the 10v lithium style batts that are rated at 1A approx again as they vary. you are looking at 1000ma/.08ma =12500hrs /24 is 520.83 days. however if you wish to power it from an external source. a well regulated 9v power supply sent down the standard guitar cable apply a capacitor in your guitar to keep dc off your pots. simple as that. http://www.till.com/articles/PreampCable/ some great inspiration i am utilizing something like this on my brian moore to power the piezo preamp in it now, as well as the strat i am rebuilding i got some great tips on relocating the strat jack from you guys so thanks on that as well

have you checked for leaky caps emitting dc on the audio path

you know people seem to keep downing winding by hand. I have wound around a dozen pickups all with very close tolerances simply by winding them in front of the tv and counting the windings as you go. watched an entire season of smallville this way. i will ad though its not fun but it passes time

cool man let me know if ya need anything i did one of those jimmy page mods a while back and it is a major pain however i found using small pcb's to make it work better for me.

sorry bud if you reread above {post 28}you will notice i mentioned i modified the one gibson saw however re reading it i may have not been so clear. the above circuit will work fine with humbuckers as the above circuit was designed to do just that. however the latest one i did the one that gibson is interested in was done with a new circuit. see there are two guitars that i wired with the above schematic. the first one is still running just like that. the second one was wanting to change pots and such and go 100% vintage. which he did including degaussing the pickups and depotting them (feel free to groan i know i did) then after all that and the neck was twisted he was bummed out so i wired the neck pickup again to my little sweet spot. and then trhough much discussion and realization as well as depression it turned out to wire the rest of the thing the way i wanted to do it. [the original one had a pcb in it and when the new pots were put in all the original mods i did were gone] also weird enough is that the p-90 pickups the neck was hotter than the bridge. it was clearly marked neck 8.3k bridge 7.5k so weird and they checked out. anyway so i put in one of my older caps i haven't used those in a while and calculated the freq roll off for each the hpf and lpf factored in the inductance of the circuit and it sounds great. the acoustic vibe works best on both pickups and you blend the treble pot to balance the right amount of snappiness. by itself each pickup only sounds like you dialed in your favorite tone. all i can say is quite simply try it if you want to. or Don't. i first started doing the math on this thing and did it on paper with 100% values i had in my guitar and plotted the freq curve i wanted in the neck pickup to help balance the tone. i put three caps together to get the right value and when i did it it sounded great however it was way brighter than i wanted it first became evident that if i do it straight from the pickups then i am going to have to account for their values as well. simply take a cap and a pot and drop it in there you only have to lift one wire to do the neck pickup mod. it will work on active passive and others you just need to figure out the freq response you wish to attenuate. of course one thing to keep in mind is having a decent pickup to work with to begin with. I first started this on a Seymour duncan Jazz neck pickup. and an old single coil on a fender strat style guitar. i plan on doing other things with it. but the basic one i put up is for all of you the project gutiar community. peter i even drew you up a block diagram of the new one. i didn't post the most recent one because lets face it this isn't rocket science and if they want to do anything with it i am going to hold on to it for a minute. its not too far from the one posted just far enough to re calculate the values. the biggest things to keep in mind is foremost: true values of your pots caps and such. i use silver mica caps mostly because they have a tighter tolerance and even then you have to have an accurate cap meter. what freq range do you want on each. for me i put a standard tone on neck blend on bridge and sweet cap on neck. but i have done it the other way too. standard tone on bridge sweet spot on neck and blend on neck. the nice thing is the tone is a master tone when on the middle section which is where the acoustic magic happens. anyway love peace and chicken grease. ed

thats pretty much the jist of it. i know they were trying hard to figure out what values i used. but they assumed that the pots were stock as well. what they don't know is that each pickup has been measured and calibrated with its own circuit. you can't drop this one i did into a hum bucker setup it just won't work the same. its a matter of lrc circuits. sadly since the pickups have inductance you have to account for that and i found the factors you need to do with hum buckers. i am still tweaking true single coils formulas it doesn't work quite like a lrc circuit but you have to take in the variables that and on the newer one its a 3db and a 6db filter there

i will see if i can get some clips for you. the modded scheme is a slightly different layout and uses p-90 pickups from lahler. as well as slightly different values and a pot switch. but it was significant enough they want it. truthfully you have to think its not that grand of a scheme but if it gets me a guitar it would be worth it. or a job would be better. who knows maybe nothing. however it is wonderful sounding and everyone who hears it loves it so i am happy at that.

i thought i would update this thread, since gibson is looking into my wiring diagram. My long time friend and client took his lespaul to Nashville and had them look at it because we told him his neck was twisting. really sad so he went to have them look at it and since it doesn't affect the playing right now he decided to keep it cause he got it tricked out the way he wanted it from me. anyway to make the long story short for all of you gibson techs plugged it up and tried it out and they started flipping at the sounds calling other tech's over to check it out. took the back off. luckily i was smart enough to take off the writing of the magic caps. and had one hidden behind another to keep the dream alive. but they busted out magnifying glasses trying to read the values. but since them he has received three emails from gibson. so we are going for a meeting soon. ed

i did something along these lines a decade or better ago and it worked fine but i was using a custom powersupply and driving four lower wattage all mosfet amps from my rig each one was setup to be like a powered twelve inch cabinet. so we made a glorified stakable unit like from the late eighties it worked well but i found it was easier and sounded better to just get a one space rack unit from carvin. thousand watts 150 bucks or so.

this is quite interesting and has been speculated by many along the years. but the one thing i have to ask myself is what about the guitars that don't have the pickup where the 24th fret would be but behind it. my ibanez is 24 frets and the pickups is butted right against it. my brian moore. same scale length but 22 frets has the neck pickup in the same position butted right against the 24th fret or at least where it would be. however this is a very informative bit of info none the less

right on the head woodenspoke. http://www.tpub.com/neets/book1/chapter3/1-26.htm for parallel resistance formulas. what i have found is that either control the tone massively from your guitar or minimalistic. if its massive then go active. if its minimalistic then go passive and remove the old tone controls and seek other methods than simple caps to ground. look at some of the posts recently like my lespaul acoustic wiring or low end fuzz varitone post we put some great stuff up there.

i have been quite the lm386 guru [at least thats what my car's tag says lol] there are some really good answers here as seen above. something to try is the bass boost function on the clean setting to help you move some air. but again by the time you get the n-4 which is the only real version for amplification of this chip there is [ie the n-3 is good for parallel outputs and for chip distortion the ones below that are just bull sh1t] by the time you do that you could get a lm380 which has more clean headroom and a larger input impedance more wattage and even the smaller lm380n-e in the eight pin package puts out more power [at least it sounds like it anyway] and is cleaner. keep in mind that you need some sort of impedance amp or buffer stage in there to keep it from loading down. if you want some really sick stuff run a 386 as a preamp into a 380 as a power amp and watch your speakers bleed with gain. its a little noisy but gives a killer sustain and crunch. like a decent sweet child o mine sound. have fun and keep on kicking. but you know they make these great tda chips that have preamp power amp and such all in a box. they even have these ic's with active six band eq preamp you just put in the pots and a couple caps in there and add power. its killer stuff. of course here at my shop i just use the surround sound. i have guitar port and a few other home made inductor and transformer coupled stuff so i can play into it and i can play prerecorded guitars out through a reamper into some amps via remote control in case of shock hazard. well i see i am rambling so it must be late. ciao ed almost forgot http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=...djB5gHBrt5TYRvA

this could be why BM decided to go the other way and use a separate output. they said it didn't sound all that well with the blend option from the polydrive. there are extra wires there to make it work. if you like i can give you a guitar straight into the line input sound for you to compare. keep in mind though my bridge is more expensive than the lr braggs. whether or not its hype or over pricing i have never played another system like mine. lol wouldn't you know i get the weird stuff. i had a similar issue on using the stock piezo on the bridges of guitars that why i went neck pocket on my strat and i have never been happier. i blend it with the pickups straight no buffer no pot just have it set to be wired in the guitar on the five way selector switch. my wiring now with it is a three way blade switch set up for neck piezo bridge. thats the rmc bridge on the BM the strat is set up on a toggle switch to ground. so the piezo tied to the output something for you to look at psw http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.ph...78&hl=piezo

if you are bored you can do a real simple diy lespaul saddle. get the smallest piezo elements you can find trim them to fit between two small metal pieces that combined equal the size of one of the lespaul saddles. i have had some luck with this but nothing i would let leave the shop yet. but i also have very little in the tool department

not all piezo's require active system the brian moore guitars are not active piezos. they do run into an active matrix that goes down the 13-pin roland gk connecter however the stereo split system does not require power nor does the output of it come from any type of amplifier. ed btw if you are like me and have access to one you can take the battery out and see what i am talking about or you can look at the poly drive system and see it as well. actually they sound much more natural this way than with a preamp. however the piece on my guitar is 279 minus the polydrive module so rmc tends to put out some very high end stuff. the balance on this as well is still very nice it really breathes better if such a thing is possible ed

yes its really a 1uf but its a blend pot now on the neck pickup and it no longer functions as a filter to ground. you need at least 10X separation in the caps to get a noticeable blend and this was going for extreme blending. when it comes to tone controls i tend to over think them if we use the one to ground then we should try a tone control that is going to truly function as such. since its supposed to be a variable low pass filter. i tend to change the cap values so that it is musical. i did this on a friends bass guitar and now the tone control is his best friend. funny though now i forgot what i put in there. i set the values for a normal four string bass. 40hz up. i rant on a bit about guitars being wired in the 50's and no one is really out there pushing passive wiring to its limits. i add extra switch positions to my 5 ways to get a little more tonal magic out of them. btw have you ever tried a 1uf in the tone pot. its great. man. i did this on my hot rod strat. sure it rolls off treble but volume too. with a medium bright metal distortion [hard rock gain] you can roll it back to a nice bluesy type tone.

OK so my buddy bought one of these Les Paul studios guitars that they are selling for a grand http://www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric-G...udio-Faded.aspx. its OK chambered body and such PCB wiring on the pots. poor poor tolerance on pots. volumes are 250k and tones are 500k way out there man. of course they don't measure anywhere near that. so here is our dear antique if you will wiring diagram let jump into the way back machine here back to good ole 1950 where everything was done right the first time and guitar wiring should never be touched because its perfect the way it is. why does my head hurt? because we can add new stuff like pcb's for the control cavity but we cant' update the wiring. so here you go welcome to 2010 now looking at this. if you didn't even use the blend function of the neck tone control this guitar would sound 100% better. the neck has definition its sassy and can belt out an awesome over driven and clean lead tone. the bridge can spank like a tele and still crunch with the best of them and the new tone cap allows a greater range of the pot to be exploited resulting in a much more useful tone control. at half way its like a nice neck tone you have never had. now if you go with the values listed here you will be able to put this in the middle position and blend the neck [i recommend center detent pots on the blend controls] and you can dial in that 470pf cap and get some really snappy over tones that are very woody acoustic like in nature and now the bridge tone control works as a master because they are all hooked together.

it may seem a little redundant but i do star grounding on all of my electrics where the space and electronics allow it. this has made all the difference in noise for me.