billm90

curiousity has me. what do you use this for.

I basically have 6 individual pickups I plan to run for a midi set up. I am wirring these up into a gk2a instead of the magnetic pickup it came with, because I am using it on a nylon guitar. The basic idea was to build something like a DIY godin nylon midi guitar. I would also like to run the 6 indivual pickup leads to a 1/4 mono jack to run all of the together to a standard guitar amp. If I split the wirring and sum at the 1/4 jack, it cause the individual midi wires to have all strings signals. basically it wont work. I need a way to seperate the summed values from the individual values. I was wondering if a diode can be put on the seperate 6 wires for each pickup befor the 1/4 jack. I guess diodes are considered 1 way valves for electricity. but I tested one that is silicone, and I cant get an ohms reading any which way I try. I dont even know if they need a voltage to work, or if it is possible to work on pickups. I am also trying to avoid running several switces to deal with this. I want the guitar body to be plain. unless there is some sort of single switch that can do this job. I dont plan on even having a volume knob on the guitar.

back on to this bridge issue... with the style of the posted picture, you will defently have a forward towards the neck and slightly upward force on it. if you for lack of a better term machine it perfectly and leave some meat around where the studs are, I think you may get in the ball park. Maybe if you can get a bigger stud head, or put a hlaf washer over the wood where it meets the studs on the top, the force will be displaced over the wood area reducing cracking. I made a neck plate out of wood for a guitar I wanted to put together really quick one night. to prevent the wood from cracking when I tightened the neck bolts, I covered the entire wood neck plate with super glue and let it absorb it for a bit, then wiped it off. It gave it a flat finish, but it has held up to numerous removals, and reinstalls with an electric screwdriver.

I have tried this. be prepared for hell. I spent the last 6 weeks, almost everynight doing different version. I was close. I always ended up with one or another having an issue, but 5 out of 6 is not bad. It can be done. I will continue on with it. it is just really frustrating

I have been fighting with DIY piezo for over 6 weeks now. I was trying to get them to work on a tune-o-matic. sort of the same very small work area. I picked up 500 piezo buzzers off ebay and kept getting mixed results. some were really loud, some dull, some dead (based on cutting to size, wiring, and placement) I did this like 10 years ago on a few tremelo bridges like strat copys. it worked with no issues, and was very ugly. I was very mad when it was taking so long to get a decent result. So I reverted back last night to the radio shack buzzers. the last 3 digits were XXX-273 these can be cut very small and none of the out put tone changes. I cut a single buzzer into 6 of these smaller then the tune-o-matic saddles and wired each one up with a + and - wire shielded. I epoxied them on last night, Like I have done 5 times already (plus made numerous wood bridged that failed). they all had the same output and sound really loud compared to the ebay buzzers I got. only negative, there are clumps of epoxy on top of the saddled, so I have to file in string slots, and they are a bit taller then the original of course. but the volume was so great it sounded like I had a electric guitar plugged in. this was all done passive. no preamps, straight into a processor and out to headphones so all tests were the same minimizing variables. the ebay buzzers were not as loud passive. I guess they were just junk. I put them on the back of the saddles so the string just contacts the leading edge of the piezo. It has been a long PITA, but doable. I put the ceramic side up and insulated from string contact with the epoxy so they dont ground out. in the past I have done a wood bridge with the brass side up... (no grounding issues with wood bridge) I have been thinking how to do it to a strat style bridge.... one ideas was to mold stock strat saddles in silicone rubber, then fill with epoxy and slide the piezo in it while wet to build something like a graphtech saddle. or use a dremel and make a slot in the metal saddle for the piezo to fit into and epoxy it in. Keeping the positive lead insulated from metal contact of course. I have a couple floyd type guitars... I will take a look and see if I can think anything up to make one. one issue is when string contact is lost, so is the piezo signal. so I guess whammy acoustic tone will be out of the question. I just wonder about epoxying them on and raising teh string height. I did mine 6 individuals because I am trying to get some midi stuff working. I am running the piezo into a g2ka pickup. it is basically replacing the magnetic pickup part of the G2ka. I am trying to make a modular system so mutiple guitars can be used with my midi pickup and quickly plugged in.

just an alternative. I have built pickguards out of plexi. you can paint the back and the paint will be protected.

if you are talking a bridge like a tune-o-matic... I tried to build one. it bows in the middle. the studs offer support but the middle was too weak. I built mine the same dimensions as the tune-o-matic. it went out of tune constantly. this was on nylon strings. perhaps if you copied an arch top bridge it would work. those things are pretty strong. or put it on the body. I am thinking that is a good idea.

Thats a cool article. Thanks

if you want a quick ghetto fix. super glue some tooth picks in there and snap them off. once dry, sand it flat and start over. keep in mind I have no idea how big bass neck screws are. I have done this on several strats. no issues.

acetone needs to soak into the glue for a bit, which is hard because the wood will soak it up, and it evaporates fast. depending on where it is, acetone could eat your inlays.

being late and knowing the results... I actually like the chipboard dirty tone. I never would of guessed.

you would want to keep the leds leads, and wires away from the truss rod. the only way I can see damage is if you adjust the rod and it touches the LED leads or wires. if this is heppening and you have exposed metal it would probably short out. if you build the finger board, route the wires away from the truss rod center line. install the LEDS so they are flush top and bottom. aside from adjusting the truss and haviong the neck bow... if you wire them up with wire rather then a circuit board, there will be no problems. if you use a circuit board... which seems far to complicated... it has potential for problems. broken solder joints etc.

simple and crude. I posted pics in some other threads... I cant get them to work right now. see if you can find another thread I made witrh piezo in the title. 6 piezo buzzers from radio shack. Cut them into strips about 1/4 wide. (dont let them touch eachother on the bridge) I used an archtop jazz bridge since it is wood and mot metal (conduct electricity) ground the back of the bridge to an angle. soldered up a + and - lead on each of the 6 piezos. super glues the leads on (they fall off easy) glues the piezos to the back of the bridge. the top of the piezo touches where the string goes over the top. wire up the leads however, mine go stereo into 2 sets of micro dip switches, the micro dip switches have 8 dip switches. I use 6 of them to turn on or off each string. on each left or right output. this allows to put what ever string I want into a stereo frield. 123 Right 456 left. Anyways.... back to in the bridge. I have been trying to put some in a tune-o-matic. I have been having balance issues. I have done 3 versions on the tune-o-matic. then I tried making 2 wood clones of rought tune-o-matics to epoxy piezos to. both had balance issues. some strings were much quieter then others. it is frustrating when I dont know why. isi it conections, epoxy? I run tests, but nothing leads me in the right direction. last night a new idea hit me when the ceramic piece broke off and it worked without the brass backing, I will try that out next.

I was looking into building a guitar with effects in it as well. As I looked into the price of what each effect would cost to build, I determined it would be easier and cheaper to buy an effect pedal and hack it into the guitar. I ended up buying 2 small foot pedal mutil processors. one for guitar, and one for acoustic. these are set it's effects and use one button up or down for banks. simple muti effects on a 9v. if you have a love for just the phaser, buy a phaser effect, something with an adjustment knob on it and put it in the guitar. If you are looking for DIY phaser circuits, I cant help. Just add it all up if you find it and decide if it is worth wasting time building something you could of just bought. how did you want to adjust the phaser? a lever? a knob, a foot pedal?

I am going to attemp to expierment with this. kind of a take off of the sustainer ideas posted. Radio shacks sells, or at least used to sell a 1 watt amp kit ~ 10 bucks. it is real small and simple to solder up. I have built it and made a portable practice amp by stuffing it into some old 1960's CB case, I used the cb speaker and it works fine. it is like a 2.5 or 3" speaker there is a small trip pot for volume. I wired in a pot with a volume knob to control volume instead of the volume trim pot. then there is an optional cap you can install for more gain. this makes a fuzz type distortion. I put it on a switch to make a fuzz option. i want to put this in a guitar and install the speaker under the pickup to make feedback.... some guys call this a DIY sustainer, but it is more so a direct feedback to the amp. they used a piezo buzzer for the speaker. so I am going to test both. I think they also had a 10 watt version. mine runs off a 9v battery. 1 watt is enough to hear it in a quiet room. for more power I would go up some watts I think the speaker will be key to making it sound good. if you are into a higher priced option, zoom sold a portable small digital effects processor with a built in speaker. it runs on 6 or 8 AA's I picked one up when I got a silent guitar off ebay because it sounded like crap. I was thinking about intalling this in the guitar to fix the original electronics problems. as a plus it has built in effects. this only sounds good going through head phones. the speaker in this processor sucks. needs a replacement. Doing all this seems fairly easy. I guess the hard part for you would be routing for speaker and electronic placement?

maybe I am missing the obvious here.... help me out anyways. If a 10K pot is used, will I actually kill off volume on a higher resistance pickup? or only tone? I have a set of piezos I wired a 10K pot because it was what was avaliable. am I killing off volume? (I want to run the piezos passive, no pre amp and I want to most volume I can get out of it) maybe I should put in a vol pot bypass. I got the piezos used and it said I need a 5meg pot. I cant find one anywhere. perhaps I should just bypass? Also, something I have been wondering.... No matter what volume pot is in there, I suppose at full volume it IS NOT like bypassing it? Now lets talk about tone pots. what do pot values of 10K or 250K or 500K do to tone? or is it mainly the sweep range? I have my piezos on a set of nylon classical strings. I like how turning the tone pot down removes the highs. is this 10K tone pot going to remove volume as well? what is the best way to set this up if I never find a 5meg pot, bypass the volume and put the tone cap on a switch? I wish I knew what I was dealing with.

in response to all of this. I have been doing tests at home and the best sound I could get was with the piezo actually touching the string. I later plan to try some other things like metal shields etc... the best sounds came from non preamped guitar. I ran it straight into a processor. with a preamp string noise was ridiculous. If one was setting out to do this and must use a preamp, I would try and burry the piezos under something to kill off string noise. I am going to play with this more. see if putting them in epoxy helps.

Sorry, I thought this post was going to be forgotten. I got the switch at radio shack http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.js...rentPage=search it is actually 2 of them together. I glued them to popsicle sticks.

I have no idea what you are doing.... but it almost sounds like you have one pickup wired backwards. meaning.... one is sending a ground signal to the positive.... so when both are running, one is being grounded, thus dead? I have had too much beer to really get into this right now... it hurts my head... lol A diagram would work wonders... but I will just ask... do you have your pickups going to teh switch, and then to the volume pot? or pickup, to volume pot, to switch?

I wont be much help untill someone comes in on this with facts. I have a dimarzzio whoknows what with something similar. I come up with red/black at 4.2 ohms with the meter set at 200K green/white at 4.2 green and black against red and white together gives me 2.1 the bare whire is just a ground. I know right before I took this pickup out of a POS junk ebay guitar, i was tapping on it and it appeared to be coil splitting when I tried the different leads against the jack. if you have any guitar with strings on it you can hook the black wire to the base of a guitar cable, and the red to the tip lead and strum the guitar and see if you can get any sound out of it holding it near the top of strings. Just be ready for feedback.

like this?

I think it looks pretty cool!

I was messaged before about installing leds in the necks of guitars. I am no expert, but have went ahead and gave it a shot years ago. learned a few things. I dont have any pics of along the way, but I am getting better at it. here is an acoustic I did maybe 10 years ago. it is a complete POS. I have totally torn this guitar to shreds. no truss rod to worry about here... I have plans for this guitar, it will be just stupid when done. http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...25108CbNWjJwza0 http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...25108CbNWjJwza0 here is a V something or another I did about 7 years ago. I sanded down a few led's too far and killed the LED output. there are brass inlays in the middle. the others inlays were offset so I did not have to worry about a truss rod when drilling. http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...25108CbNWjJwza0 here you can see it is a project guitar indeed. Some time ago I think I got drunk and scalloped the whole neck. I picked up some fret wire from stew mac to fix my mistakes. lol. I need to make a press and a tool to press in the fret new wire. http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...25108CbNWjJwza0 And here is my lastest attempt again. I took the weekend and decided to try and install led side markers. I used a dremel and cut a relief in the side of the neck. I then cut some relief cuts up and down, it would look similar to a kid drawing a scar. Then I tried to drill a hole for the LED. well that almost cost me the fret board. Luckly my dremel came with some odd router type tool thingy. I used it to cut out holes for the leds, and to allow space for the wires. I then glued the leds in, and used wood filler to clean it up, sanded it, then sprayed it black with one coat. the paint really gets sucked up by the wood filler so you can see ghost marks where I cut this guy up, or it will look like I have no idea how to spray paint. Leds off http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0 Leds on http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0 close up on http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0 Close up off http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0

maybe some ugly pics will get people going? here is the original test guitar bridge that sounds good. I built it up maybe 7 years ago... http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...25108CbNWjJwza0 http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0 http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0 here are the micro dip switches I built for stereo guitar string panning http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0 http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b7d73...26108CbNWjJwza0