M0n0mania

Its not a totally standard strat trem, so no worries on that front. having said that, Jeff Beck seems to have no probs fluttering with his standard strat trem. I'm curious as to what it is that actually makes some trems more fluttery than others.

I'm trying to set up a modified strat trem capable of doing flutter effects. Does anyone have any advice on this? I suspect that less rigid springs might be the answer, can anyone suggest a good source of springy springs?

Getting rid of a few bits & pieces; Pair of CE1 choruses £200 Eurotec Black Box effects board £200 Foxx Wa Volume pedal £65 M-Audio Audiophile soundcard £90 Terratec EWS88D soundcard £95 SKB Gig Rig £140 Yamaha P1600 power amp £250 see http://tinyurl.com/36hl6 for pix & info

duh, that smiley should be option "b )" sorry!

Sorry if the Roland bit was misleading there, this has nothing at all to do with MIDI pickups. Basically, all you need to do, is buy one of the circuits in the above links and connect a ribbon controller to it instead of a normal pot (variable resistor). This will generate the MIDI controller signal to send to the Whammy. What you have to decide first is where all the bits go & how to handle the extra wires between guitar & pedal. Either; a) the ribbon controller is inside the guitar & the circuit is outside (you'll need to run 2/3 wires out from the guitar to circuit) The circuit board (+ battery power) are inside the guitar (you need a MIDI output socket added to the guitar to connect to the Whammy MIDI input) Hope that clears it up, I only mentioned the Roland bits because it means you can use the existing multiway cable to solve this part of the puzzle.

Hey Bio, have you made any progress with this? I've been interested in doing something along these lines for ages, I always fancied a Steinberger Transtrem, but they're expensive & fiddly so I'm looking at using the Whammy controlled from the guitar. Matt B's Mansons are full of great ideas and made me think about this again. Looks like you're trying to go for the full set of mods? One thing that might be relevent is that Matt uses the Roland Hex pickup so has a 13 pin multicore cable coming out of the guitar already, in fact one of the pins (no.9) in the Roland setup is unused, so that could be sending a control voltage out of the guitar via the ribbon controller (he may just be using the Synth Volume pin 8 as the controller). You need to mod the vg88 to extract this voltage & send it to a circuit which can convert this into MIDI controller messages (see http://tomscarff.tripod.com/anal2midi/****...to_midi_out.htm or http://www.doepfer.de/pe.htm for examples). However, I suspect that controlling a whammy over MIDI might generate a fair bit of zipper noise (MIDI controllers only have a range of 128 steps so instead of hearing a clean sweep you can sometimes hear the signal "stepping" through its settings) but haven't tried so can't say for sure. Anyone else tried doing this?